Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills (2020)

bloomberg.com

13 pointsmizzao13 comments

Landfills are not an ecological problem of note; they are arguably not a problem at all. The planet is full of empty space. As long as those landfills are being properly maintained (which, admittedly, is not always a given), then having big piles of trash in the middle of nowhere is not an interesting problem at our current scale of trash generation, nor any reasonable extrapolation of our current waste generation as a species.

On the other hand, climate change is the ecological problem of note and wind turbines are a small but important part of fixing that problem.

People complaining about wind turbine blades in landfill are engaged in concern trolling. You know they care nothing about their own trash piling up in landfills. ("And lookit all those Russian tanks! Who's going to clean those up?")

"GE produces world's largest recyclable wind turbine blade" (2022) https://newatlas.com/energy/ge-worlds-largest-recyclable-win...

> The 62-meter (203-ft) prototype blade is made with Elium resin from materials company Arkema, which is a glass-fiber reinforced thermoplastic. Not only is the material 100 percent recyclable, it is said to deliver a similar level of performance to thermoset resins that are favored for their lightweight and durability.

> Through a chemical recycling method, the material can be depolymerized and turned into a new resin for re-use, acting as a proof-of-concept for a circular economy loop for the wind energy sector. Before that happens, in the coming weeks LM Wind Power will start full-scale structural testing to verify the blade's performance

And for blades that aren’t recycled, they can be shredded into insulation pellets or feedstock for cement.

Why doesn't that work with existing thermosets?

Could these be feedstock for something like these formed LEGO-style hempcrete blocks with structure that are stronger and more insulating than structural concrete? https://youtu.be/eqLXXjvQXgI

Traditional composites are difficult to recycle because of several reasons: - the thermoset polymer matrix cannot be melted or separated from the fiber in any reasonable way - the thermoset resin cannot be reformed or reshaped into a useful shape or material - graphite fiber composites in particular are very, very hard on cutting tools and are difficult to chop up (not sure about glass fiber composites, but on bulk they have similar strength characteristics to some aluminums)

These properties are difficult to separate from composites because we want composite parts to survive the elements, often high temperatures, and be robust and reliable with little fatigue

What about waterjet?

Or e.g. SYLOS laser for transmutation?

Or replicating nanomachines?

Or a vat of something like the stuff that eats plastic and everything else in the ocean if it gets out?

Probably just orders of magnitude cheaper to just bury it somewhere

https://www.quora.com/How-many-wind-turbines-could-fit-in-1-... :

> The density of wind turbines per unit of land area depends on many factors. Wind farms containing very large (1.5–2 megaWatt) turbines may have only one for every 25–50 acres. Smaller turbines can be more closely spaced.

> At either rate, the overall harvestable wind energy per unit of land at fully rated conditions (approx. 12 meters/sec wind speed), is generally in the range of 50 to 100 kW per acre.

  harvestable_wind_energy = 50-100 kW/acre

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-bigger-be... :

  average_rotor_diameter: 120m (393ft)

  blade_length = 1/2 * average_rotor_diameter = 60m (197m)

How many rotor blades can be stored on an acre?

  Acre = 43560 ft**2

  blade_depth__on_end =
  spacing_vertical =
  spacing_horizontal =

How much less $ does an acre storing the maximum number of wind turbines yield compared to a wind turbine on, say, 50 acres?

Sphere packing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing

Wind_turbine_design#Blade_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design#Blade_recy...

In Python, [JupyterLite or Mamba] Pint and Uncertainties might be helpful for units and uncertainty/error propagation.

The https://numpy.org/ pyolite (WASM) IPython demo has SymPy installed in the env but not Pint?

[1] https://github.com/hgrecco/pint

[2] https://github.com/lebigot/uncertainties

How much effort do you want to spend on what's a comparatively small problem?

There are a little over 200 buildings for every wind turbine blade in the country where I live, and I venture to guess that the average building contains more troublesome materials than the mass of a wind turbine blade.

> Built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed.

Shredding these blades does not seem to be a viable option.

Indeed, under pressure about the industry tries hard to find ways:

https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/towards-circular-wind...

https://www.veolia.com/en/news/united-states-veolia-makes-ce...

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