Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled, so they’re piling up in landfills | Hacker News Reader

Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled, so they’re piling up in landfills

bloomberg.com

58 pointsmelling98 comments

That 'can't be recycled' clickbait headline is completely refuted by TFA which quotes from one company already doing it.

"One start-up, Global Fiberglass Solutions, developed a method to break down blades and press them into pellets and fiber boards to be used for flooring and walls.... 'We can process 99.9% of a blade and handle about 6,000 to 7,000 blades a year per plant...'

Fiberglass is roughly glass in the fiber form. Glass was recycled for ages, just melt it and produce new products from molten glass.

Fiberglass is a composite that contains a lot of resin. It's not pure glass.

Resin can be chemically removed or even burned out. Surely it's a question of economy, among other things, but at least we have a choice of technological approaches.

You could do that, but that would be getting rid of most of what makes fibreglass interesting and expensive.

Recycling glass isn't that much better than just using fresh sand.

The blades aren't just fiberglass but a complex mixture of FRPs which includes glass, plastic, binders and resins. Furthermore, they're layered and vary with distance from the hub and position on the airfoil. Recycling them isn't impossible, just more difficult because of the nature of separating components and removing undesirable/unreusable components. Although the do carry incredible forces (not quite in the region of turbojet/turbofan blades but still impressive), there's probably more work to be done to make the blades fully lifecycle-designed to make them easier to recycle.

They're doing it on paper so the Toyotas of the world can continue to claim to be zero waste. That's the product. The pellets seem to be a "recycled product" without a real world use, other than being able to claim your turbine blade was recycled.

The company's landing page even brags about the process using blockchain as a selling point. In what is essentially crushing fiberglass.

It's a sham. Google turns up pages of paid PR pieces and reputation generating sites. They list potential uses of the pellets produced, but not a single real world example of an actual sale or use. No published info on adding value to an LCA. Or it being worth the energy expended to actually crush/process them after shipping the blades cross country.

They're a landfill substitute that provides a certificate, a paper trail, and good PR.

It’s just another excuses in the line that also has the ‘its bad for birds’ one.

Whereas shooting passenger-pigeons for fun and profit was just fine.

But, then, scraping the bottom-of-the-barrel has been in for the past 3.

This is better by a significant margin than any fossil fuel use the turbine is offsetting. Yes, some material will be wasted, but it is a tiny fraction of the far worse alternative.

I've seen this as a reason not to switch several times, without anyone considering the sheer physical quantity of fuel any one consumer burns into the atmosphere.

The lesser evil by an order of magnitude (I think.)

Even building a hut in Amazon disturbs nature but it beats a lot of other things, so let's encourage building huts (you get the idea)

So we should live in huts?

No, not us, them. You know, those people, for whom hut-living is appropriate. They shouldn’t move into homes like the ones we live in, a hut in the Amazon near some really big snakes will do just fine.

I'm glad someone here gets it.

I think it is pretty clear the previous poster was making a hypothetical statement and I have a bit of a hard time believing you are sincere in your statement. Please prove me wrong.

If you don't have anything better than living in huts.

It seems like this is a completely manageable amount of safe physical waste to bury.

I am curious, however, about the lifecycle analysis for the blades and the energy and emissions that go into producing them. One would think that they could be repaired somewhat indefinitely, but perhaps this is naive.

You can't really repair big fibreglass pieces, I suspect.

So you could probably keep the steel tower and put new blades on it (and repair/replace the generators etc), but the blade probably has to be replaced as one.

If anyone is interested, here is a back-of-the-envelope mass calculation:

Energy content of natural gas: 53.6MJ/kg=14.8kWh/kg Efficiency of combined cycle plant: ~50% Energy/Mass Ratio = 7.445kWh/kg

Mass of wind turbine: ~150 tons Max power: 1.5MW Capacity factor: 0.4 Lifespan: 25 years Energy/Mass Ratio = 876kWh/kg

Obviously refining the materials for a wind turbine requires more energy than making natural gas. Also obviously didn't include the mass of the natural gas plant itself. Also obviously natural gas leaks are very problematic for climate. Also obviously if only the blades are discarded (and these are typically a small percentage of the weight), you could imagine continuing to use the tower, nacelle, generator, etc...

Is that 150 tons for the whole wind turbine, or just the blades? Most parts other than the blades should be reusable or recycleable.

Could result in a 1-2 order of magnitude increase in efficiency.

150 tons for the whole thing. Blades are like 5 tons each according to the source I looked at. Mind you this isn’t a terribly large turbine by today’s standards.

I read it wrong at first, but I think the point is that the wind turbine is producing about 2 orders of magnitude more power per kg anyway, with assumptions biased towards natural gas.

It is true that turbine blades can't easily be recycled. It's also true that they do not represent a large waste stream. I am glad to hear people are working on better solutions.

Seems like a pretty inert material, definitely a good candidate for being in a landfill vs. alternatives.

I would say it's a bigger environmental issue that:

> In the European Union, which strictly regulates material that can go into landfills, some blades are burned in kilns that create cement or in power plants. But their energy content is weak and uneven and the burning fiberglass emits pollutants.

Waste incinerators, at least in Europe, are subject to very strict emissions regulations. As a result, they tend to have modern emissions collection systems that extract most of the toxic exhaust gases and other pollutants.

A turbine blade that hasn't been burned releases even fewer emissions.

Very true, and I agree that landfilling them isn't a particularly big problem. I just wanted to point out that incinerating them isn't quite as bad as it sounds.

Airborne emissions maybe, the eventual mechanical breakdown of plastics will deposit microplastics into our water systems.

This is worrying. I presume they have some scrubbers at least?

Despite all the global warming alarms, the Earth is still a thermally open system. In terms of toxic materials, pollutants and interesting new molecules, Earth is a closed system - they stay here for us to deal with.

Personally, I am more worried by us poisoning ourselves long before we cook ourselves.

While both are valid concerns, pretty much the entire scientific establishment disagrees with your priorities.

I was going to ask if they couldn't be crushed/ ground up and reused as filler in construction, etc, but looks like a company is already on it. Nice!

My quick read of it lands on them not being toxic, just large and difficult to manage. Seems like they could be used as aggregate in road construction or fill or just about whatever. Likewise, its not like they break down into some shockingly toxic biproduct, so burying them is a fine solution unless refurbishment becomes a real possibility.

Seems like direct reuse is not possible due to the blades reaching end of life, but I feel like airplane blades have a much higher threshold for operating health than windmills, could there be some potential for repurposing there?

Then again, I wouldn't want a blade snapping off and falling on me if I'm strolling through a field...

Aeroplane wings and wind turbine blades are extremely different. They are made from completely different materials, have completely different shapes and are designed for different purposes. I can't possibly see how either could ever be repurposed for the other.

Fair enough, the article stated as much too. Would they be completely worthless in a turbine setting, even if they were free?

For one thing turbine blades have to deal with high temperatures.

They're not really the same thing at all.

That's why windmills are so carcinogenic. ;(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome

> The distribution of recorded events, however, correlates with media coverage of wind farm syndrome itself, and not with the presence or absence of wind farms. Neither term is recognised by any international disease classification system, nor do they appear in any title or abstract in the United States National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. Wind turbine syndrome has been characterized as pseudoscience.

I really expect better of HN.

Basically. The construction of them means that you can estimate the difficulty of handling them by imagining you periodically had to peel the side off a few-story building, intact, and sequester it somewhere.

Still preferable to taking the side of a few-story building and turning it into a greenhouse gas (to torture this metaphor a bit).

I'd imagine there's already things in other industries that are unwieldly and made of materials that you can't just toss into a smelter and call it a day. It's just because wind turbines are correlated with the environment that their lifecycle impact ends up being heavily scrutinized. You see the same thing with solar panels and their silicon waste even if practically its a rounding error to the electronic waste of computerized happy-meal toys or whatever.

Composite turbine blades are a suitable fuel and feedstock for cement kilns. The challenge is logistical, to have enough feedstock in inventory to keep the kiln fed. Pyrolysis is also an option (similar to plasma gasification), and is how scrap automobile tires are disposed of, although you're then landfilling the resulting ash (although it might perhaps also be used in cement or asphalt).

Fibrous things like fiberglass and carbon fiber get their strength from the length of the fibers distributing force across the assembly. Ground fiberglass is basically worthless after you account for supply compared to demand. It would be better to cut them up into strips/sheets and use them to build retaining walls or something (using them whole is not practical because they are big enough to make transport expensive). The inertness of fiberglass in the presence of most common things makes it an attractive building material for things that are expose to the weather but it is expensive when new and until now there has never been much supply of used fiberglass in any consistent form factors so it is rarely used and construction techniques are not very mature (read: common enough to be cost competitive).

Honestly we can probably just let old turbine blades pile up. If there's one thing the free market is good at it's finding creative uses for expensive materials that are waste products as far as their original use is concerned.

They certainly can. They're competing with dirt, because you can dig up dirt and use it as filler in construction. So either they need to have some favourable properties compared to dirt, or the "crushing/grinding" process has to be really cheap, or the alternatives for disposing of the blades have to be expensive.

If dirt was scarce, we'd find an economic way to recycle turbine blades. We should be happy to have so much dirt, not sad that we can't reuse our end-of-life turbine blades. The same goes for the other suggestion mentioned in the article, of using them to put roofs on homeless shelters - there are other materials which are cheaper and more suitable, and no homeless shelters are going unbuilt because evil energy companies won't donate their old blades.

The article talks about a startup that is crushing them for into pellets.

>Global Fiberglass Solutions, developed a method to break down blades and press them into pellets and fiber boards to be used for flooring and walls. The company started producing samples at a plant in Sweetwater, Texas, near the continent’s largest concentration of wind farms. It plans another operation in Iowa.

https://www.globalfiberglassinc.com/

Hating landfills is very popular for some reason.

The materials have been taken from the earth and now they return to the earth.

The problem with CO2 is that it doesn't go back where it came from.

I feel the same way. Landfills will be very convenient places to mine in the future.

They would have been even better if we hadn't been paying to remove all the moderate value but easy to separate recyclables and ship them overseas. At some point those may be economically worth recycling, instead of us paying Asia to take them.

Landfills are great for inert materials. Or ones that decompose nicely. The problem is that we throw a lot of stuff that is toxic and can leak into the environment/water supply.

A modern electronic equipment has pretty good part of the periodic table inside.

It does seem quite wasteful to dig it out of the ground only to put it back in again. Especially since it seems some people are extracting value from it.

FUD for "green" tech/energy source alternatives? --checks source: bloomberg

Yeah that's what I thought. Better switch back to coal because that doesn't take up room in the landfills.

Coal in the United States is dying fast. I believe coal is down to 20% electricity generation. Natural gas is simply cheaper.

Fourth generation nuclear power plants look promising, for example:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/next-generation-n...

Perhaps we can use more hydrogen in our future:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2020/01/09/hydrogen...

Until solar panels are painted onto surfaces all options need to be in use. Perhaps even then.

In the US, largish numbers of people live in places that have historically mined a lot of coal. And by a historical quirk, many of those places are in states that are closely divided between two political parties. A further historical quirk makes those states all-or-nothing in some political elections.

So by appealing to the people who mine coal, you can tip an enormous amount of political power. That makes the mining of coal a massively important issue, because -- rather than despite -- its diminishing contribution to power generation.

This is so true it's painful.

I feel bad for these people. I really do. The writing has been on the wall for decades that coal is a bad horse to back, and poverty is keeping their options limited.

This is another example of why we need a better social safety net. Let's retrain those people with skills that will better suit them and their families. There is no reason that they should suffer with this dead-end life/career/poverty.

Retraining isn’t as effective as one might hope. For one, it is cheaper to retrain large number of people in a handful of fields than a handful of people in a large number of fields. So you get an oversupply of, say, HVAC installers. Second, many of these miners (and factory workers) live in company towns. Once the company leaves the town slowly dies due to economic suffocation. The stores, plumbers, schools, doctors, etc that used to sell services to the miners now have fewer customers because people slowly move out and the ones that stay have less money because the mining jobs are gone. It would be better to bulldoze the towns and relocate everyone to places that aren’t dying but, unsurprisingly, people don’t like that. There are hundreds of small towns like this across America that have been hoping for a new company to come and save them for decades. When a new company comes along they want to pay low wages and no taxes, and desperate local politicians acquiesce.

My understanding is that the targets of this resent social safety nets. They view them as demeaning, especially since they are capable of work. But the only work traditionally available in the region is coal mining, and that won't be fixed by retraining. So they see the coal, and the ability to work, and grow resentful that they are forbidden from putting these two things together.

They are also attached to the places, and do not wish to leave. Retraining for new jobs in cities, or even different rural areas, means leaving longstanding family homes.

I need to note that I'm not an expert. I'm speaking here thirdhand at best. But I'll note that in the last Presidential election, when asked to choose between a candidate who promised retraining and social safety nets versus one who promised to re-open the coal mines, they overwhelmingly chose the latter.

"They are also attached to the places, and do not wish to leave"

That's kind of a distorted way to look at it. People do leave, and then they aren't included in the population that's under the microscope. So the remainder is always being distilled down, no matter how bad things get, until the outside world decides they can be ignored. Same thing with farmers in the 20th century.

This is from memory and may be off, but I recently read somewhere that in the UK coal went from 70% of power to 3% in something like 30 years. Politically I guess it must have withered away.

Also, WV is stereotypically coal country, but isn't a lot of coal mining now done via open pit mining out west, like Wyoming? Not sure that's closely divided or matters much for the Presidential elections.

But this is the “Bloomberg green” section. Clearly eco friendly. /s

If anyone didn't know already, Bloomberg is often a terrible place for news in general

Many of us here found out when they posted that blatantly bullshit stuff about chip implants

I don't see why anyone should care? Finding a way to recycle wind turbine blades might shave a fraction of a percent off the cost of wind turbines, but that's it. Putting them in landfills is discarding a potential resource, but not an important one.

Seems like something that could eventually be used by wildlife, too. Drastically improved from extraction and emission.

Genuine question regarding landfills: What are the real environmental effects of stuff "piling up in landfills"?

I hear that "land filling" is bad but have never gotten a strong reason as to why. Obviously toxic/nuclear materials sitting in landfill is bad, but for other materials, what's the real harm?

Is land filling a better option, then say, ocean dumping (again, for non-toxic materials)?

Land filling is bad in the context of throwaway consumer goods that are only used once such as a plastic bag or air tight plastic wrapping. There is also the aspect of expensive appliances breaking that are not repairable. They will have to be sent to the landfill early.

However, this bad reputation absolutely makes no sense in the context of a paid off investment that lasted multiple decades and resulted in a good return.

Low Tech Magazine has some articles on using wood to make more sustainable turbines

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...

This is ultimately a FUD article, likely pushed by oil+gas advertisers and good old sensationalism.

And, oh look, there's already recycling uses planned for them.

Articles like this are for "newspaper scoring", where an issue is broken down into a set of bullet points that are pro and con. As long as the count/score of the bullet points are the same for each side, then the newspaper gets to declare itself fair and balanced.

No heed is taken to the actual impact or importance of the individual bullet points.

Unfortunately, the political consultants also know that overwhelmed voter minds also work this way.

Why not sink them and make artificial reefs?

Interesting thought, but some problems that come to mind are: 1) Is the density of fiberglass near or lower than that of water? If so, then they are very "sinky". 2) What toxins will leach out of the fiberglass resins after prolonged exposure to sea water? 3) Will the resin matrix decompose and release glass fibers into the sea water?

Buried in a landfill they are mostly inert. I would not be so sure that would be true after prolonged exposure to sea water.

Could they maybe be repurposed as transmission towers? They're long but are they strong enough for that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_tower

Imagine a fort built out of them!

Or a Bjork music video!

Fibreglass can be reused to make cement which has the benefit of reducing its production emissions by up to 16%. https://www.compositesworld.com/blog/post/recycled-composite...

https://archive.md/olTU8

Someone told me once that building and maintaining a wind turbine takes more (or same amount of) energy then produced by that same wind turbine in its lifetime. I failed to find research to back that up. Maybe anyone here knows more?

I’d look on the climate changer denier debunking websites. That’s the sort of trope that gets rolled out by the fossil fuel “think tanks” and denier troll farms.

Example: https://www.desmogblog.com/institute-energy-research-admits-...

If that were true then you would expect countries with wind turbines to produce more CO2 emissions than countries that didn't.

Only if they’re being manufactured in the country where they’re used.

Taking the subsidies out and examining the profitability of all the companies on the supply chain tends to add up to a loss. Given there isn't much labor involved, energy costs are a good candidate for the lack of profitability.

If the input energy costs more than the money the turbine makes, there's a good chance that the turbine doesn't make enough energy to produce itself.

There is considerable energy and funding being applied to car ion sequestration. Burying fiberglass, or carbon fibre, which does not decompose (creating methane) is sequestering carbon. So it’s the right thing to do.

I feel like you could def recycle them, at the very least cut them up/reshape them into smaller turbine blades.

I am curious. Can't these be thrown in near oceans containing coral reefs and then turn them into new coral reef support structures? Looks like these would be best for such a use.

Build a section of The Great Southern Wall with them? ;-)

This seems like a clickbait/scare-mongering/right-wing hit piece.

The real story is not that they can't be dealt, with, more like companies are just being lazy and not dealing with the problem.

The article goes on to mention there's already progress on dealing with this waste..

And this waste is not doing any of the things the fossil fuel industry is so good at. The blades are not burning up in the atmosphere, they're not being ground up and dumped in the ocean, they're not leaching super dangerous liquid chemicals into the soil/water, etc..

No different than the fear mongering that batteries or electric cars are way worse than tail pipe emissions and oil industry pollution for ICE vehicles.

Damn, back to coal I guess.

This is one of the cons of this green energy movement, there is a shitload of waste from solar, wind, and batteries that nobody wants to talk about.

People are bad at comparing, say, 10k tons of solid waste to 10M tons of CO2. That doesn't mean that they are equally bad.

I think it's fine not to talk about it because people will easily get stupid ideas like renewables being just as bad for the environment.

Cost, land / real estate, storage, and transport are some real problems.

Worse than the millions of tons of pollutants released per second every day all over the world from non-green energy?

Non-green energy releases more than 2 million tons/second of CO2 alone every day.

There probably haven' been 2 million tons of turbine blades produced in history.

> a shitload of waste

How does it compare to traditional energy sources in terms of volume and toxicity?

The fact that we are discussing a published article seems to suggest somebody wants to talk about it. Also, non renewable sources of energy produce a ton of waste as well! Petroleum refining, for example, is notoriously wasteful.

More info: https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/hazard/web/html/index-63.ht...

In this case, it seems more like a logistics problem than an environmental one since the blades are made from inert materials and therefore good candidates for landfill. I'm assuming the cost does not justify crushing it for other uses but it could be done at some point if needed.

No there isn't. The waste is very limited and quite benign compared to fossil fuel waste. Take these turbine blades. Ok, you have to put them into a landfill after 20 years of use, but as far as things you have to put into a landfill, it is the best you can ask for -- it does not pose a danger to the environment, it will not leak poisons into the groundwater. More or less it will just sit there forever.

In comparison, coal and oil produce air pollution that you cannot sequester, that you have to release in the air for people to breather. Oil further produces liquid waste that is very difficult to sequester and regularly destroys the environment, and poisons drinking water. Coal further produces massive amounts of coal ash, that is incredibly dangerous and hard to store and regularly gets released into the air or the drinking water when hit by extreme whether.

Nuclear produces waste that must be continuously cooled at great cost so that it does not set itself on fire and release massive amounts of radioactive gasses. Even then, the complex cooling systems regularly fail, and do occasionally release massive amounts of radioactive gasses.

All of the above not only produce much more waste but their waste is far more dangerous and damaging.

> Nuclear produces waste that must be continuously cooled at great cost so that it does not set itself on fire and release massive amounts of radioactive gasses.

Seems like you are talking about high-level waste (HLW) which is just 0.2% [1] of all radioactive waste by volume.

The cooling you are referring to is a passive cooling pond [2], there's no active cooling. There are no radioactive gases escaping from the spent fuel - not small or massive amounts. Spent nuclear fuel is a solid. Liquid waste is from weapons programs, not power generation.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool

Is radioactive fuel wildly more difficult and dangerous to manage than a few thousand inert turbine blades? Absolutely.

I have to agree. No one really talks about EOL for alternate energy gear. I would call not knowing what do with the blades when they reach EOL is a serious oversight. "Can't be recycled" usually means "it is not economically feasible to recycle them and still turn a profit".

More often than not: "and still turn the same profit"

People talk about it all the time, like for instance the original article. The problem is that it gets a bit tiresome to counter the same nonsense again and again: Yes, everything we as humans do has an environmental impact. No, the impact is not even close to the impact of fossil fuels.

I never suggested that it is as bad as fossil fuels.

"This green energy movement" as compared to what then? perpetuum mobile?

I mean, this seems like a much more tractable problem than, say, coal fly ash (you typically get a choice of storing that in big holding ponds which subsequently leak, or directly in the local populations' lungs). Or, er, CO2.

Also, you're literally commenting on an article about it in a major media outlet, so I'm a bit dubious about this "no-one wants to talk about it" thing.

What about the billion tons of coal exhaust in the atmosphere?

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