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Fiberglass is pretty inert, right? It's also used for boat hulls. I wonder if turbine blades could be cut up and used for artificial reef construction the way d
by dodobirdlord 7y ago
Fiberglass is pretty inert, right? It's also used for boat hulls. I wonder if turbine blades could be cut up and used for artificial reef construction the way decommissioned ships sometimes are. But perhaps the blades are lighter than water.
- killjoywashere 7y agoAs a diver, I have to say, artificial reef isn’t quite what you think. We dive wrecks all the time that are 60-130’ down and have been there for 70-100 years and barely have any coral, certainly not like the massive walls of coral elsewhere in the same islands. Some of it has to do with the depth: most life is in the 0-40’ zone. And the oxygen drops off quite a bit, which inhibits oxidation (rust). There’s another wreck we dive at 40’ that’s barely recognizable due to corrosion and life. There’s an area that has coke bottles from 1945 (the glass is date-stamped) and they barely have anything growing on them. If you dump fiberglass in shallow water, people are going to be pissed. If you dump fiberglass in deep water, it will likely not decompose for millennia. But it also won’t be a Mecca for perch and sharks like some make them out to be.
- rubinelli 7y agoFiberglass would break down and release microplastics, though, so it is not as environmentally friendly as a sunk metal hull.
- allovernow 7y agoYou can't work fiberglass like metal. It can't be welded and it fractures before it bends. That's partly why fiberglass parts in complex shapes tend to be expensive - they must be shaped at the time of manufacture before they cure. Fiberglass is a fiber reinforced resin which is typically built by laying down thin fibrous sheets in molds and "painting" them with liquid resin. Also labor intensive and hard to automate.