eg: (2026)
Australia is home to 31 wind farms with turbines over 15 years old. Over the next decade, countless blades will require replacement.
~ https://www.acciona.com.au/turbine-madeWhich explains the current low numbers of companies taking GFRP (primary component of wind turbine blades) down to particle size for reuse.
See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213... (2024) and companies such as Acciona.
Or solar panels.
Steel is infinitely recyclable and valuable enough as scrap to largely be recycled at a high rate.
Solar panels are so cheap new because there’s bigger all of anything worth recovering in them.
The secondhand market is littered with stacks of panels that don’t move.
The glass isn’t worth anything as scrap, we literally throw it in the recycling bin and it costs councils and governments to recover it and manage the waste streams, largely done as a vanity project.
Aluminium is so light and there is so little of it wrapped around a solar panel it’s not worth the labour and machine capability to recover it.