Wind Turbines

Gael23

Was in a conversation with singing yesterday who suggested that the blades on wind farms cannot be recycled and end up in landfill at the end of their life.

Is this correct?

magicbastarder

they're made of composites, so very difficult to recycle. some companies are making noise about recycling them, but in general, the claim is true.

Gael23

I guess they can be some way shredded and take up less space in the ground

Capt'n Midnight

They are mostly hollow so yes.

Glass and carbon fibres aren't reusable but the raw materials are plentiful and most of the cost is fabrication

The epoxy or other glue / binder is usually thermosetting so not reusable. Raw materials are usually fossil fuel based so this is a much better use than in a thermal power plant.

If volumes of a standard typo of blade are enough it might be possible to go to aluminium ones , but huge setup costs.

the_amazing_raisin

They're difficult to dispose of but to be frank compared to the mountains of rubbish we create from other sources it's not as big a problem as some make of it

There's projects looking at repurposing them for other uses. Building insulation or fill material is one idea

Or there's this idea from Cork
https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/06/18/old-wind-turbines-are-being-reborn-as-bridges-in-ireland

Capt'n Midnight

the_amazing_raisin wrote: »

Or there's this idea from Cork
https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/06/18/old-wind-turbines-are-being-reborn-as-bridges-in-ireland

In Ireland alone, over 11,000 tons of blades are due to be decommissioned by 2025

There's just no comparison to how much fossil fuel one power station in the UK used to use.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/25/greenwash-drax-power-plant

Drax still burns a staggering 30,000 tonnes of coal a day. Instead of getting it from down the road, though, it gets at least half from South Africa and from Kuznetsk in south-west Siberia.

magicbastarder

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

In Ireland alone, over 11,000 tons of blades are due to be decommissioned by 2025

say that's 11k tons in three years. it's one three thousandth of the waste ireland will produce in the same period.

CelticRambler

I know a guy who has a working prototype system for recycling fibreglass, composites and other "non recyclable plastics". Living in a French coastal town, he was inspired to develop the system after seeing the massive quantities of fibreglass boat hulls being dumped in landfill. The process is fairly simple - grind up the product, use simple physics to separate out what's truly recyclable and the rest is turned into filler/padding for new moulded products.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, he's come up against no end of trouble trying to get local authorities to send him their rubbish, because they've signed medium and long-term contracts with other recyclers who cream off the most valuable waste and dump the rest. I've just received the annual newsletter from my own townland's waste company, on the one hand bragging about how great a job they're doing on reducing what they send to landfill, and on the other, telling me/us/the public that we need to "do more" to stop putting supposedly non-recyclable waste into the recycling bins/bags and to throw it in the black bin instead. :rolleyes:

the_amazing_raisin

CelticRambler wrote: »

I know a guy who has a working prototype system for recycling fibreglass, composites and other "non recyclable plastics". Living in a French coastal town, he was inspired to develop the system after seeing the massive quantities of fibreglass boat hulls being dumped in landfill. The process is fairly simple - grind up the product, use simple physics to separate out what's truly recyclable and the rest is turned into filler/padding for new moulded products.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, he's come up against no end of trouble trying to get local authorities to send him their rubbish, because they've signed medium and long-term contracts with other recyclers who cream off the most valuable waste and dump the rest. I've just received the annual newsletter from my own townland's waste company, on the one hand bragging about how great a job they're doing on reducing what they send to landfill, and on the other, telling me/us/the public that we need to "do more" to stop putting supposedly non-recyclable waste into the recycling bins/bags and to throw it in the black bin instead. :rolleyes:

Yeah it's pretty annoying when you see soany food products sold in non recyclable containers

I honestly think we don't need to reinvent the wheel with this one. When the plastic bag tax was introduced, everyone stopped using plastic bags

Introduce taxes on non recyclable packaging materials and consumers will demand recyclable packaging soon enough

magicbastarder

i suspect that's a complex issue, in that say for example, pringles claim their packaging is recyclable; but if it's not economically viable to do so, or no one does it - does the onus lie on the producer to produce recyclable packaging, or on the recycler to recycle it?

e.g. if the waste recyclers here were to stop accepting aluminium cans, the drinks industry could cry foul that they're the ones being penalised.

Tabnabs

CelticRambler wrote: »

I know a guy who has a working prototype system for recycling fibreglass, composites and other "non recyclable plastics". Living in a French coastal town, he was inspired to develop the system after seeing the massive quantities of fibreglass boat hulls being dumped in landfill. The process is fairly simple - grind up the product, use simple physics to separate out what's truly recyclable and the rest is turned into filler/padding for new moulded products.

The boat example is a difficult one, as I know from several in-depth studies and projects that I have been involved in. The amount of fibreglass from end of life boats is not significant enough to make it a meaningful commercial operation in any ongoing capacity. Then there is the labour involved in stripping the boat out of all the other materials attached and bonded to the fibreglass. Finally, it is a matter of debate whether the environmental impact of recycling a fibreglass boat is greater than the impact of using new materials. Essentially, is it worth the energy (literally) to recycle when less is used to produce from new?

CelticRambler

the_amazing_raisin wrote: »

Yeah it's pretty annoying when you see soany food products sold in non recyclable containers

What I'm seeing is a refusal to take recyclable containers. Or municipalities making life difficult. We had an example, here in France, where the local town council refused permission for a supermarket to install a PET drinks bottle collector-crusher - because they'd just paid a massive load of money to subsidise a commercial (multinational) company to build a new sorting facility, and they didn't want ordinary citizens giving the valuable PET to someone else in exchange for money. :rolleyes:

Tabnabs wrote: »

The boat example is a difficult one, as ... The amount of fibreglass from end of life boats is not significant enough to make it a meaningful commercial operation in any ongoing capacity.

That was exactly the problem addressed by my acquaintance. The same difficulty faces many other sectors - including the composite sails of wind turbines - where it's traditionally seen as uneconomic to recycle a recyclable compound, but only because well-established companies like to stick with their old-style equipment. My acquaintance's next target (if he can get past the administrative inertia) was to start recycling asbestos using a minor tweak of the same production line.

the_amazing_raisin

magicbastarder wrote: »

i suspect that's a complex issue, in that say for example, pringles claim their packaging is recyclable; but if it's not economically viable to do so, or no one does it - does the onus lie on the producer to produce recyclable packaging, or on the recycler to recycle it?

e.g. if the waste recyclers here were to stop accepting aluminium cans, the drinks industry could cry foul that they're the ones being penalised.

I think there's always someone who loses out when you introduce taxes to change behaviours

People have this hatred of paying for things they don't have to, even if it costs them more in the long run to avoid it. Taking plastic bags as an example, the reusable bags used to cost several euros when they first came out.

You'd need to use a reusable bag 10 or 20 times before the they paid for themselves. Likely in that time you'd forget to bring the bags and end up paying for more and arguably you could just reuse the plastic bags and have a cheaper option

And yet people stopped using plastic bags almost straight away, mostly I suspect because they just hated the idea of paying for something they deemed disposable

CelticRambler

You don't have to look far for creative alternatives to landfill for end-of-life turbine blades:

https://www.re-wind.info/

hirondelle

CelticRambler wrote: »

What I'm seeing is a refusal to take recyclable containers. Or municipalities making life difficult. We had an example, here in France, where the local town council refused permission for a supermarket to install a PET drinks bottle collector-crusher - because they'd just paid a massive load of money to subsidise a commercial (multinational) company to build a new sorting facility, and they didn't want ordinary citizens giving the valuable PET to someone else in exchange for money. :rolleyes:



That was exactly the problem addressed by my acquaintance. The same difficulty faces many other sectors - including the composite sails of wind turbines - where it's traditionally seen as uneconomic to recycle a recyclable compound, but only because well-established companies like to stick with their old-style equipment. My acquaintance's next target (if he can get past the administrative inertia) was to start recycling asbestos using a minor tweak of the same production line.

It is a complicated affair. I would say that diverting PET away from the domestic and commercial kerbside collection does have a negative impact- PET and aluminium are the two relatively valuable waste streams in the bin, they subsidise the cost of recycling paper, tetrapaks and the the less valuable plastics. Don't get me wrong, some of the waste companies are part of global entities and the shareholders are the only real winners- but deposit return schemes aren't the panacea some think of them as.

Recycling asbestos I wouldn't think has any legs though- how can it be brought back into use given it's toxicity?

einn32

hirondelle wrote: »

It is a complicated affair. I would say that diverting PET away from the domestic and commercial kerbside collection does have a negative impact- PET and aluminium are the two relatively valuable waste streams in the bin, they subsidise the cost of recycling paper, tetrapaks and the the less valuable plastics. Don't get me wrong, some of the waste companies are part of global entities and the shareholders are the only real winners- but deposit return schemes aren't the panacea some think of them as.

Recycling asbestos I wouldn't think has any legs though- how can it be brought back into use given it's toxicity?

I'd be interested to hear how asbestos would be recycled.

CelticRambler

hirondelle wrote: »

I would say that diverting PET away from the domestic and commercial kerbside collection does have a negative impact- PET and aluminium are the two relatively valuable waste streams in the bin, they subsidise the cost of recycling paper, tetrapaks and the the less valuable plastics.

That's the nub of the problem - when the concept of recycling is pushed as an "all or nothing" exercise, it encourages consumer-producers to think of everything as rubbish with little value; they see no difference between PET and an Amazon carton. If you incentivise people to selectively recycle the most valuable product, they won't just redirect a lot more of their own waste, but they'll actively collect it from other sources too (granny's shed, hedgerows, public litter bins ... )

On the industry side, companies will exclude recyclables like soft plastic because it gets tangled in their sorting machine, and (like my waste company) tell householders to throw it in the black bin instead. At one point, a few years ago, my black bin waste was about 90% soft plastic ... not any more. :cool: And then you have the situation where the industrial recyclers don't, in fact, subsidise recycling the low value waste - they just ship it off to some far-away island in Asia.

hirondelle wrote: »

Recycling asbestos I wouldn't think has any legs though- how can it be brought back into use given it's toxicity?

einn32 wrote: »

I'd be interested to hear how asbestos would be recycled.

Asbestos isn't toxic - it's a highly stable product and resists all kinds of abuse, which is how it came to be so widely used - but its particles have a peculiarly spiky structure that embed themselves deep in lung tissue and provoke a malignant reaction.

The proposed process (in the simplest terms) was to fuse the asbestos particles with the fibreglass waste to create a spike-free product.

einn32

CelticRambler wrote: »

That's the nub of the problem - when the concept of recycling is pushed as an "all or nothing" exercise, it encourages consumer-producers to think of everything as rubbish with little value; they see no difference between PET and an Amazon carton. If you incentivise people to selectively recycle the most valuable product, they won't just redirect a lot more of their own waste, but they'll actively collect it from other sources too (granny's shed, hedgerows, public litter bins ... )

On the industry side, companies will exclude recyclables like soft plastic because it gets tangled in their sorting machine, and (like my waste company) tell householders to throw it in the black bin instead. At one point, a few years ago, my black bin waste was about 90% soft plastic ... not any more. :cool: And then you have the situation where the industrial recyclers don't, in fact, subsidise recycling the low value waste - they just ship it off to some far-away island in Asia.





Asbestos isn't toxic - it's a highly stable product and resists all kinds of abuse, which is how it came to be so widely used - but its particles have a peculiarly spiky structure that embed themselves deep in lung tissue and provoke a malignant reaction.

The proposed process (in the simplest terms) was to fuse the asbestos particles with the fibreglass waste to create a spike-free product.

But it's still asbestos containing?

Capt'n Midnight

einn32 wrote: »

But it's still asbestos containing?

Some asbestos contains very tiny pieces of sharp glass. When your white blood cells engulf them the sharp edges pierce the cells and they burst. And each piece of glass can keep killing whitee blood cells because it's still sharp.

It's not poisonous. So once you melt the glass it's no longer dangerous.


Large pieces can't be engulfed , smaller pieces won't burst the cells. The problem is that some kinds of asbestos has particles of the wrong size.

einn32

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Some asbestos contains very tiny pieces of sharp glass. When your white blood cells engulf them the sharp edges pierce the cells and they burst. And each piece of glass can keep killing whitee blood cells because it's still sharp.

It's not poisonous. So once you melt the glass it's no longer dangerous.


Large pieces can't be engulfed , smaller pieces won't burst the cells. The problem is that some kinds of asbestos has particles of the wrong size.

So how do you melt the glass?

CelticRambler

einn32 wrote: »

But it's still asbestos containing?

After treatment, no - it'd be transformed into an alternative material. There are already ways of doing this, e.g. using microwaves or ultrasound but for the most part asbestos waste goes straight to landfill.

The hazards associated with removing it from buildings and transporting it to a disposal site wouldn't change; my acquaintance's proposal was simply to use it as a raw material to help with the disposal of another "challenging" waste product and keep two relatively benign materials out of landfill sites.

einn32

CelticRambler wrote: »

After treatment, no - it'd be transformed into an alternative material. There are already ways of doing this, e.g. using microwaves or ultrasound but for the most part asbestos waste goes straight to landfill.

The hazards associated with removing it from buildings and transporting it to a disposal site wouldn't change; my acquaintance's proposal was simply to use it as a raw material to help with the disposal of another "challenging" waste product and keep two relatively benign materials out of landfill sites.

Thanks. Interesting information. What asbestos based products can be treated? Cement sheet/pipe, mastic, zelemite and what about friable asbestos?

It's cheaper to put to landfill I presume. Like most issues with recycling it boils down to economics. Waste is a business after all. The energy and legalities to get an asbestos treatment facility up and running would be insane I would think.

NIMAN

Just seen this story about the huge windfarm off the coast of Scotland , which is now capable of providing 2/3 of their households.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67126815

And it cost £3bn.

Wondering why it's taking so long for us to get something like this up and running? With so much money sloshing around the kitty at present, are we making any inroads into providing free electricity?

Are there plans to have our western coastline to be littered with wind farms?

ednwireland

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills?embedded-checkout=true

Robert333111

There are a few options for disposing or recycling wind turbine blades:

Quote: [1.] 'The company said the “newly discovered chemical technology” breaks down old blades in a liquid to produce high quality materials, which can eventually be used to make new blades, as well as components in other industries.'
[2. …] a resource management company headquartered in France, turns old blades into an ingredient for cement production. It shreds, sorts and blends blade materials before sending them to cement kilns. Using this blend reduces the planet-heating pollution produced in cement manufacturing by 27%, according to [the company whose name is mentioned on the webpage]. The program has processed 2,600 blades so far.
[3.] [...] a Tennessee-based company, has worked with the US Department of Energy to help scale up its “pyrolysis” technology – a form of chemical recycling that uses very high heat in an oxygen-free environment. The company’s process produces glass fibers, which can then be used in new wind turbine blades, as well as in the automotive and shipping industries, it says. It also produces oil that can be used in energy production[…]. The technology allows them “to fully and completely upcycle wind turbine blades” in a process that is “net positive energy,” [the person interviewed] added. [The company named on this webpage] has so far
upcycled 41 blades weighing 268 tons and is building recycling facilities and with the aim of scaling up to more than 5,800 blades a day. […]
Source:
I'm not yet allowed to post Links, but you can see the latter quote (including the names of any companies and persons I have omitted) by searching in your web browser (without the quotes) for:
"Wind energy has a massive waste problem. New technologies may be a step closer to solving it"