5 ms·

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!

• RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
  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.
  • sk0g 7y ago
    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...
    • nicktelford 7y ago
      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.
      • sk0g 7y ago
        Fair enough, the article stated as much too. Would they be completely worthless in a turbine setting, even if they were free?
        • ben7799 7y ago
          For one thing turbine blades have to deal with high temperatures. They're not really the same thing at all.
          • DonHopkins 7y ago
            That's why windmills are so carcinogenic. ;( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome
            • nicktelford 7y ago
              > 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.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    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).
  • tomatotomato37 7y ago
    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.
• toomuchtodo 7y ago
  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).
• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  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.
• dmurray 7y ago
  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.
• jimkri 7y ago
  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/ https://www.globalfiberglassinc.com/