Wind giant Vestas says it can now fully recycle wind turbine blades

This article is pretty light on details. The main things that matter when recycling is how much of a cost savings over new is possible and how much the resulting material is degraded by the process. You can 'recycle' anything with enough money and enough tolerance of bad product.

Good news, but agreed. GE announced a shred-to-cement program in 2020 (27% cement CO2 reduction ). That was better than sending (currently 8000 blades/year) to landfills.

A few more details from Ryan Ginder in links below. Looks like it's a better way to 'extract the glass fiber reinforcement and use it to make higher value recycled composites'. He claims 'the process is material-agnostic'.

https://mabe.utk.edu/ut-receives-funding-to-recycle-wind-tur... [2020]

https://www.mdpi.com/2313-4321/4/2/24 [2019]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE0cGugRe1w [11:45]

This was always one of the major problems with alternative energy sources. Wonder how the whole industry will change.

It’s a minor problem, the amount of waste is relatively small.

Landfill takes space away from nature that would otherwise be for wild spaces, so this is good news for the environment if it all stacks up.