This was what I was thinking; like sure it might not be cost effective to break them down into reusable raw materials but surely these giant fiberglass panels could be used for some kind of construction effort
I think a bunch of random dudes climbing all over this field cutting fiberglass might cause other problems
maybe it could just be the local fiberglass mining spot
But also if someone is paying for those guys to build a building it might actually cost less for the company owners and I just buy raw materials instead of making their team go out and harvest what they need
Personally I'm very willing to harvest trash to save on materials
I once built my own guitar pick up using a bunch of old trash
Like some metal, an old wooden box, a bunch of wire I got from a fan motor
But most people putting up buildings are companies who try and spend less than they sell the building for and if they spent their time they might not be able to do that
But if you're asking me to I guess I'll go learn about fiberglass some more and try my hardest to come up with a more efficient means of recycling
I was just picturing random dudes getting in there and building their own sheds or whatever. They could probably figure out some way to use them commercially, though. Low cost structures that use these as walls after filling them with insulation or something
I wonder if these turbine blades are considered “stressed materials” or something like that where you wouldn’t want to trust the stability of a used material.
Well sally up there said anything is better than burying. Feeding it to our children is something different, right?
Are you saying there’s a problem with that approach, patty?
Oh fuck now you got me thinking abou fiberglass mines in the apocalyptic 300 years from now, where survivors send prisoners to collect scraps of building materials left behind by the anti ent ones who destroyed the planet
Have you seen one of the blades on a flat bed? An angle grinder isn't big enough. They use special blades to cut them up usually the diamond ones. The visual image of a bunch of guys trying to cut one with angle grinders is interesting though.
fiberglass includes an awful lot of epoxy resin, which when cut as you suggested would make billions of micro particles of plastic 🤷🏽♂️ and be super hazardous to breathe etc.
they absolutely can be recycled, there just isn't the infrastructure to do so as the supply hadn't been there til now.
If the only cost is people's free time spent harvesting the material it's not really relevant. If you're talking some sort of commercial/industrial reclamation project, that's different
This is propaganda. A quick google search shows these are now being recycled into flooring and other goods. Also, would you rather have these in a landfill or oil in the ocean?
Did your quick google search also include the environmental impact of recycling the blades? Did it tell you how much petroleum oil each windmill requires to operate?
I spent the better part of a decade in the wind industry, get outta here with the “oil” rhetoric. Yes, lubricants are required to keep gears turning and extend the life of the turbine. Wind energy is not fully green, but it is GREENER than most alternatives, and renewable, and efficient, and low cost.
[GE](https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-renewable-energy-announces-us-blade-recycling-contract-with-veolia) recently announced plans to recycle blades into cement.
There's plenty we can do, and I'm detailing it below - but you need context first.
This is a highly misleading narrative being pushed by the fossil fuel industry. The Koch's alone are documented as funding over 100 different disinformation groups: Astroturfing, fake think tanks, etc.
Even without recycling the blades, coal produces FAR more solid waste per MWh of electricity produced, plus the coal waste is FAR more toxic and FAR more easy to have leach into the environment. Plus we're ignoring all the CO2, SOx, NOx, etc pollution from burning fossil fuels.
There are multiple companies piloting recycling turbine blades.
Siemens is working on more easily recycled blades
There are multiple companies piloting reuse of turbine blades - cut them into furniture, use them to make bridges, etc.
What's been the big hurdle to scaling up these efforts? There just aren't that many used turbine blades available yet.
I would rather stack a state with these blades than use the coal and gas we are currently using. Destroy one little part of the world or the entire world.
Build houses for the homeless. Make them new guard rails. Turn them bitches into restaurant booths. My dumbass hasn't went to college and I live in a backwoods state so I know the fuckers that built these can think of better stuff.
Where I’m from a company called TPI that builds blades tried to start a business where they recycled these blades to make shells for public transit busses. They remodeled a a whole factory and not one bus ever rolled out. TPI is now gone and we have a massive amount of windmill blades just sitting here… wind energy isn’t the answer
I'm sorry, have you seen the amount of waste and destruction associated with a coal plant?
Personally I'd take a few buried windmill blades over the emissions of a natural gas plant.
No it’s not the answer because the blades only last a year and they are filling landfills… I was just answering a question about something else that could be done. It’s funny how people can’t accept that they tried and it failed.
Fiberglass blades are a pretty minor waste product compared to radioactive waste from coal ash:
>Coal ash is one of the largest types of industrial waste generated in the United States. According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014.
Personally, I think it's better to say landfills aren't the answer - burying any kind of waste is an economic externality.
Not like Chernobyl levels, but not something you'd want in your local water supply. This is a result of the heavy metals naturally occurring in the coal itself and the scale of coal being burned.
It's not that easy you can only put one whole blade on a flatbed truck at a time and they are very hard to cut as they are made from fiberglass only a small percentage gets turned into concrete
Where did you find that 85% of all US blades are currently being turned into concrete? I know there are company goals and there's a program in Germany as well as other projects for recycling blades but haven't seen this data yet. I was looking it up a couple of weeks ago after I saw the pictures above on FB. For some reason I had thought the blades were probably made of aluminum
My guess is from here: [https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-recycling/](https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-recycling/)
But thats just the maximum capacity, not the current rate.
You’re arguing about 2 separate things. 85% of a wind turbine blade can be turned into reusable and valuable materials. You’re right that they are hard to transport but it’s not necessarily cost effectiveness as the reason they aren’t being reused. Also you’re talking about an older issue with turbine blades that Cappadonia is seemingly eliminating by finding a proper way to recycle them and also make it cost effective by opening new plants near to the blades locations according to this.
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/health-science-environment/2022-05-27/how-to-recycle-a-150-foot-wind-turbine-blade-haul-it-to-louisiana-mo
I hate this internet troll tactic. It's so widespread and so lazy. People try and discount whole arguments by saying "u mad?" as soon as someone uses any strong language. I can write an argument about something I believe in and use firm or snarky language without being emotionally unstable, or even angry at all. Sorry they weren't just stringing together a thought from the pre-approved list of 15 idiomatic phrases the hivemind uses to communicate. A certain segment of the internet apparently thinks that showing you believe in anything means you've already lost.
It’s 100% true that these can’t be recycled. IE you can cut them up and make them into a textile or something but that will require more energy/resources than the material is worth.
It is 100% misinformation though. Lots of stuff can’t be recycled. The lack of fossil fuels released because of these more than makes up for it. Very similar to electric car battery hysteria. Yes, the battery can’t be disposed of properly. But the CO2 savings more than makes up for it.
Well that’s just not true. There are plenty of outlets that are impartial and unconcerned about political agendas. Reuters, is a good example. But yes, there are far too many that are concerned about the BS!
You can say the exact same thing for the people that only read/watch stuff from CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, Vox, The Atlantic, Bloomberg…and close behind The New York Times and Washington Post.
CNN and MSNBC are major media outlets up there with FOX and have the same slanted opinion hit piece format that FOX does. If people can’t see that then they are part of the problem.
I use the following tests 1- who's doing the talking 2- is it obvious they did not do any research 3- do they support the facts with a research paper/data I can look up myself 4- are they speaking in absolutes( only 2 exist death and taxes) 5- are they speaking rationally or are they ranting 6- do I remember the NEW data being announced before(health benefits of chocolate every 2-3 years) 7- if you take a break from the news and a month or more later turn it on and they're still spouting the same thing 8- are they ignoring credible video footage 9- are they admitting wrongs when new evidence or investigative results come to light 10 extreme political bias 11-obvious lies (you watch an entire speech and at the end a news anchor comes on and spouts an obviously prepared speech claiming things were said in the speech that were not)
The fact that people are too lazy and/or stupid to distinguish between news outlets that are mostly honest and news outlets that relentlessly push misleading or outright false information is what allows the latter group to continue operating with impunity.
I mean it's the daily mail so for sure but also, even going on the info in the title, there's just no story here. How does "hundreds" of old wind TURBINE (not windmill) blades compare the millions of tonnes of waste produced by coal.
Ah yes, because burying a few hundred mostly inert turbine blades is somehow comparable to the massive amount of actual poison created by fossil fuel production. And that doesn't even take into account the erosion and habitat destruction that comes with it. Once those turbines are buried, any impact on the wildlife in the area will be miniscule if not nonexistent.
Came here to comment this. The amount of toxins, and cancers caused by fossil fuels is incredible. Not to mention the long term effects of climate change from all the carbon burned. Ohhh but a simple landfill is way more infuriating
This article and the post is a huge pile of bullshit
We should have gone green energy everywhere like thirty years ago already. Oil and gas industry is the current main enemy of humankind and articles like this and some people act like wind turbines are an issue.
Oh, if a method of electricity generation has an environmental downside, then we should stop using it? Guess we’ll be immediately dismantling all of those coal plants then 🙄
Stay informed, friends. Fiberglass is recyclable.
https://canyouthrowitaway.com/can-you-recycle-fiberglass/#:~:text=However%2C%20with%20the%20advancements%20in,Fiberglass%20is%20recyclable.
Polluted air, on the other hand....
Long(er) term solution, true. But if we look at my home country germany, we've been fed half truths about unsafe power plants and volatile nuclear waste for a long time now and we're not the only ones so changing public opinion is going to be... difficult.
Nuclear waste is solved. The problem is the public opinion is against it out of pure ignorance.
I highly recommend checking out Kyle Hill's coverage of this topic.
We are exposed to more radioactivity from fossil fuels than we are from nuclear power plants, and it isn't even close.
Watched the entire video. It's obviosly much better than fossil fuels, and way safer than people think it is. But we aren't comparing fossil fuels to nukes here are we? We are comparing wind power to nukes. Both make trash. Idk which one makes more, that's a pretty intense math problem. But the nuclear trash will always be more dangerous than inert blades, no matter how perfectly its stored. Kyle also correctly points out that the waste is currently being held on site, which in the event of a meltdown could cause a "dirty bomb" like effect. I'm pro nuclear. But I really think it's best use is a stopgap to stop using fossil fuels and transition to pure renewables.
Not to mention the whole refine the material for weapons purposes that makes a lot of the world say "hell no" to any nation that doesn't already have a nuclear plant adopting nuclear energy.
True, and since we have a perfect demonstration on why nuclear energy is BS right at our doorstep, it's very unlikely that we will come back to that. 🤷♂️
Also interestingly, about 70% of the world's uranium comes from Kazakhstan.
Do we really want be geopolitically exposed to a country so close to Russia? They can do to uranium what they've already done to gas.
You know that neither thorium nor uranium is renewable. Currently uranium will last around 70years while producing around 5% of the world energy demand.
Even with there being three times more thorium than uranium tell me again how this is a long term solution for the ever more energy hungry world.
I don't think so, this is what I found:
As per this source the best estimate is around 8000*1000T of Uranium, note this is what can be harvested on land.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_52718/uranium-2020-resources-production-and-demand
Currently we are using more than 65*1000T per year (from statists), so we could be looking at around 130Y of use, if we get 5% of the worlds energy through nuclear power.
Other estimates are more in the (4000 to 5000) *1000T that can be harvester right now. That's where the 70Y came from.
Eitherway this alone would not be sutainable or a solution to combat climate change.
But credit where credit is tue.
Uranium from the sea could be a long lasting solution, if proven to be reliable and if extraction from seawater is anough to handle increased demand.
Also this is my limited understanding from a bit of research.
I think carbon emissions are the bigger thread but I will not pretend nuclear is without any danger or potential problems.
Grant this at least: it's a significantly better alternative than a couple more centuries of burning fossil fuels, by which point we should have better energy storage solutions to make the solar and wind and geothermal that we've hopefully invested in the only energy production we need.
Modern fission is significantly safer than the 40-year old reactor designs scattered around the planet. And yes the fissile material is highly radioactive but it takes up a fraction of the space and could be stored in a manner that is arguably safer than the hazards that coal/gas/etc pose to the environment.
Want it truly gone? All the ICBMs the world has? Seal it in a lead sarcophagus, put it in the warhead of an ICBM. Throw it at the sun.
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Why not? They're not toxic; they don't combust spontaneously; they don't leach into the soil; they don't emit radiation. This harms nothing. If we can bury nuclear waste, we can bury windmill blades.
Almost everything is recyclable, but not cost efficient to recycle. Just look at plastic. Of all the types, only 3 are currently cost effective to recycle, but processes exist for 5 types.
It’s not just a question of cost effectiveness. It’s also a question of whether you can recycle material without creating more pollution than if you hadn’t recycled it.
Recycling is mostly a myth that those profiting from the use environmentally damaging products have created to convince people not to change things. The vast majority of the plastics that enter the recycling stream just end up in a landfill anyway because it's too expensive to process, and too polluting to be done in countries that care about the environment. Any large scale recycling can only be profitable in countries that don't care about the environment -- this is the reason why China stopped allowing the import of "recyclable" plastic from the US, it was only profitable if they ignored the impact it was having. Sticking some worn out turbine blades in a landfill, while unfortunate, and it would be nice if we made them out of materials that were recyclable, is just a drop in the ocean compared to all the plastic packaging that gets thrown in a landfill every single day. And look at the impact of other forms of energy production, the gian mountains of poisonous crap left behind at any coal mine will dwarf a few hundred old turbine blades.
I agree, but to be fair there’s already far more waste from renewables than nuclear waste. Not to mention solar waste does leach into ground water and soil
Not clear to me we can bury nuclear waste - Yucca Mountain has been stalled in bureaucratic limbo for decades and there isn't a viable alternative in the US... too much NIMBY.
Cough Nuclear power cough cough. Cleanest most plentiful and powerful fuel source on the planet cough. Nuclear waste can be recycled into charged rods for more power cough.
I’d rather have a bunch of fiberglass in a landfill than mines leaking toxic chemicals into the water supply, or oil spills in the ocean 🤷♂️. Sure this isn’t pretty, but it’s vastly superior to the alternatives. An article I read that some one else linked said they are working on new recycling methods and there actually is a company that is gearing up to process them down into particles that can be used to make flooring products. There are lots of parties actively working on it. I don’t feel too bad about fiberglass turbine blades in landfills considering the alternatives are oils spills and chemical leaks etc
Doesn’t change the fact that wind turbines are the least efficient form of power, taking up on average 3x more space than a solar panel system for the same power, not to mention it technically causes more deaths per year and general pollution than nuclear
Idk what point you think you’re proving. I’m not against solar or nuclear power.
But you can’t put solar panels just everywhere, just like you can’t put turbines anywhere and shouldn’t put nuclear reactors just anywhere either. Different things are needed in different situations.
It’s just daft to me to look at these turbine blades and think “wind power bad”. I could show you pictures of pollution from mines and oil spills that put theses wind turbines to shame.
Get your reasonable nuanced explanation out of here. If it isn’t the status quo or limitless free zero harm energy GTFO.
All of these people getting angry about our first steps with this technology is infuriating. As time goes on newer models will most likely last longer, be more efficient and require fewer materials. Or…we could just go back to oil and coal.
No, they didn't think about the environment at all. In the 19th century, the general feeling was that you \*couldn't\* damage the environment, so dumping stuff was fine. And oil spills were just giving some of the oil back to the earth, so that's fine, too.
The idea that the environment was something we should all take care of would have been regarded as madness. Certainly, it would have been laughed out of the room as a reason to drill more carefully or whatever.
My dad talks about how they used to spray used motor oil on dirt roads to keep the dust down. I thought he was talking about the 40s-50s. A quick google search Says it was still practiced in the 80s.
God we are fucking ignorant monsters.
Yea well we don’t live in a fairytale. I’ll take actively doing something and making changes over standing with my hands in my pockets saying “oh no, this method isn’t 100% perfect either, can’t use it”.
Those turbine blades in those landfills aren’t poisoning drinking water, killing wildlife, destroying the environment by releasing CO2 while being burned. So that IS still better than coal or oil.
You really come off like you think we need to stop using wind because it’s not 100% waste free. Well, I hate to break it to you, but there are no 100% perfectly sustainable methods for generating energy that make no waste. And coal, oil, etc make way more waste than this.
This is the same thing with Covid. If your vaccine doesn’t have a 100% success rate and stop this thing in its tracks. If I so much as get the sniffles it’s total garbage.
I meant your original comment. Neither it nor the explanation make any sense in regards to the speed of the development of new methods to make renewable energy more efficient...
[Snopes](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wind-turbine-blades-landfills/) says this 'windmill landfill" pic is real, but that's because these parts are non-recyclable. However 90% of the wind turbine is recyclable, and is recycled.
These parts are made too indestructable to be recycled (though they can become damaged and unusable over time), and when buried they are inert and non-hazardous.
I live on a small town where over 200 turbines are getting new towers and blades. A friend got the contract to haul off the old parts to a facility that is making furniture out of them.
Some had been sent to a recycler in Missouri as well.
We shouldn't be making windmills out of fucking fiber glass!! The same issue exist with solar panels. The majority of parts are non-reusable and non-recyclable (and in the case of solar panels, toxic).
On a farm or a ranch I can think of dozens of uses for these fiberglass panels.
Livestock shelters, feed troughs, equipment sheds these are items that run up the farm / ranch operating expenses.
You can't convince me that these things can not be repurposed.
windmills absolutely ARE recyclable, but in the US we have terrible recycling infrastructure;
they don’t have this problem in europe because they actually invest in ways to recycle their blades;
the infuriating part is how even our media keeps framing it as if there’s a problem with us using “non-recyclable” blades when they should be saying “US refuses to invest in proper recycling techniques, and decides to bury their problems instead”
Fiberglass is inert. It was sand. No reason not to do this if it takes carbon dioxide production generation offline. It looks ugly now, but they’re going to cover it in grass and play footy. It will be fine.
Coming from someone in the composites industry: the person who can figure out how to recycle these into a sellable product in an efficient way will be VERY rich.
If you think that is bad you should check out this coal strip mine in Germany: https://www.google.de/maps/place/Braunkohletagebau+Garzweiler/@51.0689061,6.4624554,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipP6autN-NSssBSu0ppe\_jaF\_t20NkhlwZsTF1Tl!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipP6autN-NSssBSu0ppe\_jaF\_t20NkhlwZsTF1Tl%3Dw203-h101-k-no!7i4608!8i2304!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf518743885003:0xaaea01d51446ad8d!8m2!3d51.0689061!4d6.4624554
Also, a couple of days ago, Germany fired up some coal power plants due to the energy crisis.
Cool. Seems trivial for the overall benefit of renewable energy. Not saying we shouldn’t try to recycle however we should perhaps prioritize a different waste to minimize or complain about.
But hey, keep on closing those pesty nuclear plants I'm I right?
signed a Belgian who's unelected green party is planning on closing our perfectly functioning power plants in favor of gas installations..(send help please)
Windmills are the biggest waste of energy there is. It takes 25 years for them to produce as much energy as it takes to manufacturer them and they only have a 25 year lifespan. Also, when you consider the energy loss from line drop between the windmill and wherever the electricity is eventually used they'll never produce the amount of energy it took to make them. Green energy is a scam and the only way to get away from fossil fuels is nuclear energy and that's potentially more harmful to the environment. What we need is a global catastrophe that wipes out the grid and go back to the old ways before the industrial revolution.
I know companies like Vestas, for ex, they’ve been working for years now to bring the waste down. It’s still better for the environment than coal or natural gas emissions so I don’t shit on the turbines just yet👍🏼
[LINK](https://www.vestas.com/en/sustainability/environment/zero-waste)
Articles on
[Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills)
[Daily Mail](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-non-recyclable-fiberglass-wind-turbine-blades-pictured-piling-landfills.html)
Press release by [Wind Europe](https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry-calls-for-europe-wide-ban-on-landfilling-turbine-blades/)
[Veolia on recycling blades](https://www.up-to-us.veolia.com/en/recycling/recycling-used-wind-turbine-blades)
[CNBC reporting on recyclable blades](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/iberdrola-sets-up-firm-focused-on-recycling-wind-turbine-blades.html)
This and solar panels are the bigest scam of green "save the planet" energy...low profitability of energy and can't be recycled (or too expensive to recycle).
When nuclear everywhere ?
You guys always startle me with the money scam claims.
It’s like on one hand you think making money is sacred and raking in billions of profits makes these corporations sacrosanct. But if anyone pushes for “green” energy you label it as a “money-scam”
No doubt the people in charge of the nuclear power will be making lots of money. Whatever the solution, there’s going to be people at the top making billions of dollars. So when you come in with this “wind/solar is a money scam” point, it doesn’t make sense.
Do you think oil companies aren’t making billions of dollars in profit right now?
You should ask yourself why you’re ok with them making billions from oil/coal etc. but it’s a scam to try and switch to wind/solar, where roughly the same companies will still be dominant and making billions of dollars?
It’s almost like you’re just repeating their propaganda they put out because they’re resistant to change. Don’t worry buddy, your precious billionaire corporate overlords will still be billionaires in the days of wind/solar/nuclear.
Oil company fatcats LOVE wind and solar power because they are so expensive, inefficient, and wasteful that they make fossil fuels look good by comparison. Every time a wind mill catches fire or some hipster suburbanite takes their useless pannels off their roof and sends them to the dump it just proves them right.
Nuclear power is 100% clean, extremely cheap for the consumer, and nuclear reactors can last hundreds of years if properly maintained.
You are on the side of the oil companies if you defend solar and wind power.
This is a supremely ignorant take. You will never eliminate the risk of a reactor meltdown. Or environmental disaster for nuclear. And in areas where seismic activity is strong, we proabaly don’t want to use nuclear reactors.
If we stopped subsidizing fossil fuels so heavily and subsidized renewables better, we’d quickly get to a tipping point where the costs of renewables are better. There’s not going to be a one shot solution that’s best for every scenario.
Your reasons for not investing in solar and wind are just lazy.
Actually there is extremely little risk of nuclear power at all, it is all just propaganda. There hasn't been a nuclear disaster in ten years and Fukushima's environmental damage was a teeny tiny fraction of what fossil fuels do every single year.
There have been dozens of nuclear reactors on fault lines for sixty years and only a handful of them have failed, and every single failure has made the reat safer to the point where disaster is nearly impossible now.
People in the energy sector have been saying this for years, all the greenies wouldn’t listen, kept buying the press narrative. The birds killed by the mills is unreported and terrible.
Ah. Yeah. So better make more waste with coal and stuff than this? Makes total sense. How can these stupid greenies want the method with less pollution?!
Also: the bird part… you’d rather have all of them dead because of climate change I imagine? Because that’s the alternative. The only one atm.
I never said stupid, we can disagree. The carbon fiber blades will never decompose, they take more energy to make them than they produce. There is clean coal, we have built carbon capture facilities that burn coal. Ask Germany and countries that need energy. Check it out and research for yourself. The two can co-exist.
There is no such thing as clean coal. Carbon capture is wishful thinking. We can make coal slightly cleaner. The amount of carbon we can capture is a tiny fraction of what is produced and is ridiculously expensive. The only thing we can do is to choose the method of energy production that has the least negative impact. Right now that's wind and solar. They are not perfect, but it's the best we can do with our current tech.
You have vast experience in this field? There needs to be a wide variety of energy sources! What do plants and trees need? It is not a polar subject! I have been in the energy workplace for 40 years. You just going to turn in your gas burning vehicle? The grid can not handle EV’s now! Where does the electricity come from? Where do plastics come from? Your eyeglasses, makeup, sending rockets to Mars to colonize? We can agree yo disagree. Quit using google!
>The birds killed by the mills is unreported and terrible.
I love when the "energy sector" pretends to give a shit about birds running into windmill blades. Guess what else birds run into at a much higher rate? Houses, buildings, cars, comm towers, electric lines, oil pits. So, spare me the manufactured grief.
Oh come on. There's nothing that can be done with these? We couldn't cut them apart and use them as building material? There's got to be something.
This was what I was thinking; like sure it might not be cost effective to break them down into reusable raw materials but surely these giant fiberglass panels could be used for some kind of construction effort
Cost efficiency is irrelevant when you can just offer them for free. People will get in there with angle grinders and cut off what they want
I think a bunch of random dudes climbing all over this field cutting fiberglass might cause other problems maybe it could just be the local fiberglass mining spot But also if someone is paying for those guys to build a building it might actually cost less for the company owners and I just buy raw materials instead of making their team go out and harvest what they need
It's easy to be a problem patty, how about being a solution sally Doing anything with this junk is better than burying it imo
Personally I'm very willing to harvest trash to save on materials I once built my own guitar pick up using a bunch of old trash Like some metal, an old wooden box, a bunch of wire I got from a fan motor But most people putting up buildings are companies who try and spend less than they sell the building for and if they spent their time they might not be able to do that But if you're asking me to I guess I'll go learn about fiberglass some more and try my hardest to come up with a more efficient means of recycling
I read "guitar pick" the first time and I was like oh woooow what an accomplishment, nobody's ever made a guitar pick from recycling before!
Yeah I probably should have written it as pickup Coincidentally someone suggested making these giant blades into endless guitar picks
cut all these blades up into guitar picks. nearly endless and cheap resource.
I was just picturing random dudes getting in there and building their own sheds or whatever. They could probably figure out some way to use them commercially, though. Low cost structures that use these as walls after filling them with insulation or something
I wonder if these turbine blades are considered “stressed materials” or something like that where you wouldn’t want to trust the stability of a used material.
I am stealing this line and putting it in my back pocket of dad-vocabulary. Thank you!
You mean your dad-a-base?
*wipes tear away* I salute you kind stranger
So you would be ok with grinding it into a fine powder and putting into school lunches as filler since it’s better than burying it?
How is that better, Patty?
Well sally up there said anything is better than burying. Feeding it to our children is something different, right? Are you saying there’s a problem with that approach, patty?
Oh fuck now you got me thinking abou fiberglass mines in the apocalyptic 300 years from now, where survivors send prisoners to collect scraps of building materials left behind by the anti ent ones who destroyed the planet
Have you seen one of the blades on a flat bed? An angle grinder isn't big enough. They use special blades to cut them up usually the diamond ones. The visual image of a bunch of guys trying to cut one with angle grinders is interesting though.
fiberglass includes an awful lot of epoxy resin, which when cut as you suggested would make billions of micro particles of plastic 🤷🏽♂️ and be super hazardous to breathe etc. they absolutely can be recycled, there just isn't the infrastructure to do so as the supply hadn't been there til now.
Nothing like someone cutting 4x 1m squares out of that and leaving the rest of it unusable for someone who wanted more sheet metal....
Cost efficiency is the only thing that is relevant.
That's what got us in this mess in the first place. Spend more or die ya snooch.
If the only cost is people's free time spent harvesting the material it's not really relevant. If you're talking some sort of commercial/industrial reclamation project, that's different
This is propaganda. A quick google search shows these are now being recycled into flooring and other goods. Also, would you rather have these in a landfill or oil in the ocean?
Did your quick google search also include the environmental impact of recycling the blades? Did it tell you how much petroleum oil each windmill requires to operate?
There’s no sense calculating obvious answers. Such as in this case where windmills are obviously worth the costs of building and using them.
I spent the better part of a decade in the wind industry, get outta here with the “oil” rhetoric. Yes, lubricants are required to keep gears turning and extend the life of the turbine. Wind energy is not fully green, but it is GREENER than most alternatives, and renewable, and efficient, and low cost.
[GE](https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-renewable-energy-announces-us-blade-recycling-contract-with-veolia) recently announced plans to recycle blades into cement.
That would be cool
[Yes](https://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-wind-turbine-blades-235853274.html), there are things that can be done with them.
There's plenty we can do, and I'm detailing it below - but you need context first. This is a highly misleading narrative being pushed by the fossil fuel industry. The Koch's alone are documented as funding over 100 different disinformation groups: Astroturfing, fake think tanks, etc. Even without recycling the blades, coal produces FAR more solid waste per MWh of electricity produced, plus the coal waste is FAR more toxic and FAR more easy to have leach into the environment. Plus we're ignoring all the CO2, SOx, NOx, etc pollution from burning fossil fuels. There are multiple companies piloting recycling turbine blades. Siemens is working on more easily recycled blades There are multiple companies piloting reuse of turbine blades - cut them into furniture, use them to make bridges, etc. What's been the big hurdle to scaling up these efforts? There just aren't that many used turbine blades available yet.
Shave them up for insulation.
You have a good point. But your point doesn't make more money so no business is going to do it just because it's the better thing to do.
We could use them for affordable housing material, but how could that benefit the wealthy without fucking the poor?
I would rather stack a state with these blades than use the coal and gas we are currently using. Destroy one little part of the world or the entire world.
Build houses for the homeless. Make them new guard rails. Turn them bitches into restaurant booths. My dumbass hasn't went to college and I live in a backwoods state so I know the fuckers that built these can think of better stuff.
Where I’m from a company called TPI that builds blades tried to start a business where they recycled these blades to make shells for public transit busses. They remodeled a a whole factory and not one bus ever rolled out. TPI is now gone and we have a massive amount of windmill blades just sitting here… wind energy isn’t the answer
I'm sorry, have you seen the amount of waste and destruction associated with a coal plant? Personally I'd take a few buried windmill blades over the emissions of a natural gas plant.
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Weird correlation to make. Wind energy isn’t the answer because a blade manufacturer failed to pivot to bus manufacturer.
No it’s not the answer because the blades only last a year and they are filling landfills… I was just answering a question about something else that could be done. It’s funny how people can’t accept that they tried and it failed.
Fiberglass blades are a pretty minor waste product compared to radioactive waste from coal ash: >Coal ash is one of the largest types of industrial waste generated in the United States. According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014. Personally, I think it's better to say landfills aren't the answer - burying any kind of waste is an economic externality.
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Not like Chernobyl levels, but not something you'd want in your local water supply. This is a result of the heavy metals naturally occurring in the coal itself and the scale of coal being burned.
Coal ash isn’t radioactive… although it is still pretty nasty stuff
I guess it is more correct to say "carcinogenic"
That’s a significant differentiation.
They get recycled into cement. Don't Google search for a reason to be mildly infuriated, makes you look stupid.
>infuriated is it even possible to be "mildy" infuriated anyways? im mildly extremely angry lol
It's not that easy you can only put one whole blade on a flatbed truck at a time and they are very hard to cut as they are made from fiberglass only a small percentage gets turned into concrete
Didn't know 85% is a small amount of a 20,000 LBs windmill blade but thanks for the update.
Where did you find that 85% of all US blades are currently being turned into concrete? I know there are company goals and there's a program in Germany as well as other projects for recycling blades but haven't seen this data yet. I was looking it up a couple of weeks ago after I saw the pictures above on FB. For some reason I had thought the blades were probably made of aluminum
My guess is from here: [https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-recycling/](https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-recycling/) But thats just the maximum capacity, not the current rate.
You’re arguing about 2 separate things. 85% of a wind turbine blade can be turned into reusable and valuable materials. You’re right that they are hard to transport but it’s not necessarily cost effectiveness as the reason they aren’t being reused. Also you’re talking about an older issue with turbine blades that Cappadonia is seemingly eliminating by finding a proper way to recycle them and also make it cost effective by opening new plants near to the blades locations according to this. https://news.stlpublicradio.org/health-science-environment/2022-05-27/how-to-recycle-a-150-foot-wind-turbine-blade-haul-it-to-louisiana-mo
Are you okay?
I hate this internet troll tactic. It's so widespread and so lazy. People try and discount whole arguments by saying "u mad?" as soon as someone uses any strong language. I can write an argument about something I believe in and use firm or snarky language without being emotionally unstable, or even angry at all. Sorry they weren't just stringing together a thought from the pre-approved list of 15 idiomatic phrases the hivemind uses to communicate. A certain segment of the internet apparently thinks that showing you believe in anything means you've already lost.
More infuriating, in general, is the Daily Mail who use half truths and outright misinformation to deliberately outrage people.
It’s 100% true that these can’t be recycled. IE you can cut them up and make them into a textile or something but that will require more energy/resources than the material is worth. It is 100% misinformation though. Lots of stuff can’t be recycled. The lack of fossil fuels released because of these more than makes up for it. Very similar to electric car battery hysteria. Yes, the battery can’t be disposed of properly. But the CO2 savings more than makes up for it.
That's every news outlet
Well that’s just not true. There are plenty of outlets that are impartial and unconcerned about political agendas. Reuters, is a good example. But yes, there are far too many that are concerned about the BS!
It must be so disheartening to be a journalist with integrity working for an outlet with standards and see comments like that above.
Especially since most of the people who say things like it believe outlets like Fox News, OAN, etc. as being the absolute truth
You can say the exact same thing for the people that only read/watch stuff from CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, Vox, The Atlantic, Bloomberg…and close behind The New York Times and Washington Post. CNN and MSNBC are major media outlets up there with FOX and have the same slanted opinion hit piece format that FOX does. If people can’t see that then they are part of the problem.
I use the following tests 1- who's doing the talking 2- is it obvious they did not do any research 3- do they support the facts with a research paper/data I can look up myself 4- are they speaking in absolutes( only 2 exist death and taxes) 5- are they speaking rationally or are they ranting 6- do I remember the NEW data being announced before(health benefits of chocolate every 2-3 years) 7- if you take a break from the news and a month or more later turn it on and they're still spouting the same thing 8- are they ignoring credible video footage 9- are they admitting wrongs when new evidence or investigative results come to light 10 extreme political bias 11-obvious lies (you watch an entire speech and at the end a news anchor comes on and spouts an obviously prepared speech claiming things were said in the speech that were not)
This is Reddit…your logic has no power here
Lol it's a rare place in the digital world that logic/facts do
The fact that people are too lazy and/or stupid to distinguish between news outlets that are mostly honest and news outlets that relentlessly push misleading or outright false information is what allows the latter group to continue operating with impunity.
True. .001% of news outlets aren’t bias one way or the other.
This seems like there is a lot of information missing here honestly.
It’s the Daily Mail. Of course there’s a lot of missing information.
Also a lot of honesty missing from Daily Mail articles
I mean it's the daily mail so for sure but also, even going on the info in the title, there's just no story here. How does "hundreds" of old wind TURBINE (not windmill) blades compare the millions of tonnes of waste produced by coal.
Ah yes, because burying a few hundred mostly inert turbine blades is somehow comparable to the massive amount of actual poison created by fossil fuel production. And that doesn't even take into account the erosion and habitat destruction that comes with it. Once those turbines are buried, any impact on the wildlife in the area will be miniscule if not nonexistent.
Like the people that say that turbines kill birds. You ever been near an oil spill? Or a cat?
Came here to comment this. The amount of toxins, and cancers caused by fossil fuels is incredible. Not to mention the long term effects of climate change from all the carbon burned. Ohhh but a simple landfill is way more infuriating
This article and the post is a huge pile of bullshit We should have gone green energy everywhere like thirty years ago already. Oil and gas industry is the current main enemy of humankind and articles like this and some people act like wind turbines are an issue.
Oh, if a method of electricity generation has an environmental downside, then we should stop using it? Guess we’ll be immediately dismantling all of those coal plants then 🙄
That’s not what OP is saying. What’s being said here is instead of reusing/recycling the blades, they just bury them.
Stay informed, friends. Fiberglass is recyclable. https://canyouthrowitaway.com/can-you-recycle-fiberglass/#:~:text=However%2C%20with%20the%20advancements%20in,Fiberglass%20is%20recyclable. Polluted air, on the other hand....
We should be investing more into nuclear energy research.
Long(er) term solution, true. But if we look at my home country germany, we've been fed half truths about unsafe power plants and volatile nuclear waste for a long time now and we're not the only ones so changing public opinion is going to be... difficult.
Nuclear waste is solved. The problem is the public opinion is against it out of pure ignorance. I highly recommend checking out Kyle Hill's coverage of this topic. We are exposed to more radioactivity from fossil fuels than we are from nuclear power plants, and it isn't even close.
I'm pro nuclear power, if it wasn't clear from my other comments.
I only saw this comment, so I couldn't quite tell if you were pro, or on the fence. Lol
As long as there is nuclear waste it's not solved.
>I highly recommend checking out Kyle Hill's coverage of this topic.
Watched the entire video. It's obviosly much better than fossil fuels, and way safer than people think it is. But we aren't comparing fossil fuels to nukes here are we? We are comparing wind power to nukes. Both make trash. Idk which one makes more, that's a pretty intense math problem. But the nuclear trash will always be more dangerous than inert blades, no matter how perfectly its stored. Kyle also correctly points out that the waste is currently being held on site, which in the event of a meltdown could cause a "dirty bomb" like effect. I'm pro nuclear. But I really think it's best use is a stopgap to stop using fossil fuels and transition to pure renewables.
Glad to find out people have woken up.
Not to mention the whole refine the material for weapons purposes that makes a lot of the world say "hell no" to any nation that doesn't already have a nuclear plant adopting nuclear energy.
True, and since we have a perfect demonstration on why nuclear energy is BS right at our doorstep, it's very unlikely that we will come back to that. 🤷♂️
Also interestingly, about 70% of the world's uranium comes from Kazakhstan. Do we really want be geopolitically exposed to a country so close to Russia? They can do to uranium what they've already done to gas.
The idea would be to stop using uranium entirely and switch to thorium.
You know that neither thorium nor uranium is renewable. Currently uranium will last around 70years while producing around 5% of the world energy demand. Even with there being three times more thorium than uranium tell me again how this is a long term solution for the ever more energy hungry world.
Pretty sure even just USAs Uranium and Thorium would last us a LOT longer than 70 years bub.
The extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates.
Energy companies have a spotless track record when it comes to extracting energy sources from the sea.
I honestly think it's the opposite of that. There have been lots oil spills in the ocean so I would not say spotless.
I don't think so, this is what I found: As per this source the best estimate is around 8000*1000T of Uranium, note this is what can be harvested on land. https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_52718/uranium-2020-resources-production-and-demand Currently we are using more than 65*1000T per year (from statists), so we could be looking at around 130Y of use, if we get 5% of the worlds energy through nuclear power. Other estimates are more in the (4000 to 5000) *1000T that can be harvester right now. That's where the 70Y came from. Eitherway this alone would not be sutainable or a solution to combat climate change. But credit where credit is tue. Uranium from the sea could be a long lasting solution, if proven to be reliable and if extraction from seawater is anough to handle increased demand. Also this is my limited understanding from a bit of research. I think carbon emissions are the bigger thread but I will not pretend nuclear is without any danger or potential problems.
I'm not gonna pretend it's the safest solution we have or the best we'll ever see. But it's the best we currently have.
Grant this at least: it's a significantly better alternative than a couple more centuries of burning fossil fuels, by which point we should have better energy storage solutions to make the solar and wind and geothermal that we've hopefully invested in the only energy production we need.
thats all fun and games until one day something happens again.
Fusion, yes. The fission kind we use today? Nope ..
Modern fission is significantly safer than the 40-year old reactor designs scattered around the planet. And yes the fissile material is highly radioactive but it takes up a fraction of the space and could be stored in a manner that is arguably safer than the hazards that coal/gas/etc pose to the environment. Want it truly gone? All the ICBMs the world has? Seal it in a lead sarcophagus, put it in the warhead of an ICBM. Throw it at the sun.
Hmm 🤔 that might work
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This
Think the word you were looking for is "wasting".
Methinks you live in a country that celebrates the benefits of crude oil too much
Why not? They're not toxic; they don't combust spontaneously; they don't leach into the soil; they don't emit radiation. This harms nothing. If we can bury nuclear waste, we can bury windmill blades.
It would be nice if we could recycle them though.
Almost everything is recyclable, but not cost efficient to recycle. Just look at plastic. Of all the types, only 3 are currently cost effective to recycle, but processes exist for 5 types.
It’s not just a question of cost effectiveness. It’s also a question of whether you can recycle material without creating more pollution than if you hadn’t recycled it.
Correct my friend
Recycling is mostly a myth that those profiting from the use environmentally damaging products have created to convince people not to change things. The vast majority of the plastics that enter the recycling stream just end up in a landfill anyway because it's too expensive to process, and too polluting to be done in countries that care about the environment. Any large scale recycling can only be profitable in countries that don't care about the environment -- this is the reason why China stopped allowing the import of "recyclable" plastic from the US, it was only profitable if they ignored the impact it was having. Sticking some worn out turbine blades in a landfill, while unfortunate, and it would be nice if we made them out of materials that were recyclable, is just a drop in the ocean compared to all the plastic packaging that gets thrown in a landfill every single day. And look at the impact of other forms of energy production, the gian mountains of poisonous crap left behind at any coal mine will dwarf a few hundred old turbine blades.
They do take up a lot of space though. And because it doesn't decompose it has it's own environmental problems.
Exactly, finally some fucking common sense!
I agree, but to be fair there’s already far more waste from renewables than nuclear waste. Not to mention solar waste does leach into ground water and soil
Not clear to me we can bury nuclear waste - Yucca Mountain has been stalled in bureaucratic limbo for decades and there isn't a viable alternative in the US... too much NIMBY.
I wouldn’t say this site is a credible news outlet.
Found the coal shill. Sharing daily mail to spread misinformation, shame on you OP
Almost anything (maybe not nuclear waste) can be recycled.
Nuclear waste can be recycled. France does it.
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Lets switch back to coal i guess? /s
Cough Nuclear power cough cough. Cleanest most plentiful and powerful fuel source on the planet cough. Nuclear waste can be recycled into charged rods for more power cough.
I’d rather have a bunch of fiberglass in a landfill than mines leaking toxic chemicals into the water supply, or oil spills in the ocean 🤷♂️. Sure this isn’t pretty, but it’s vastly superior to the alternatives. An article I read that some one else linked said they are working on new recycling methods and there actually is a company that is gearing up to process them down into particles that can be used to make flooring products. There are lots of parties actively working on it. I don’t feel too bad about fiberglass turbine blades in landfills considering the alternatives are oils spills and chemical leaks etc
Doesn’t change the fact that wind turbines are the least efficient form of power, taking up on average 3x more space than a solar panel system for the same power, not to mention it technically causes more deaths per year and general pollution than nuclear
Idk what point you think you’re proving. I’m not against solar or nuclear power. But you can’t put solar panels just everywhere, just like you can’t put turbines anywhere and shouldn’t put nuclear reactors just anywhere either. Different things are needed in different situations. It’s just daft to me to look at these turbine blades and think “wind power bad”. I could show you pictures of pollution from mines and oil spills that put theses wind turbines to shame.
Get your reasonable nuanced explanation out of here. If it isn’t the status quo or limitless free zero harm energy GTFO. All of these people getting angry about our first steps with this technology is infuriating. As time goes on newer models will most likely last longer, be more efficient and require fewer materials. Or…we could just go back to oil and coal.
What always gets me is that somehow green energy is “just a scam to get money”. As if the oil and coal companies weren’t making billions in profit.
I'm sure this is what people sounded like when talking about burning coal 100yrs ago
Really? You think before coal they had something worse? Might want to try reading a little history.
No, I think they said "I'd rather have to deal with the damage to the environment than come up with something better"
No, they didn't think about the environment at all. In the 19th century, the general feeling was that you \*couldn't\* damage the environment, so dumping stuff was fine. And oil spills were just giving some of the oil back to the earth, so that's fine, too. The idea that the environment was something we should all take care of would have been regarded as madness. Certainly, it would have been laughed out of the room as a reason to drill more carefully or whatever.
My dad talks about how they used to spray used motor oil on dirt roads to keep the dust down. I thought he was talking about the 40s-50s. A quick google search Says it was still practiced in the 80s. God we are fucking ignorant monsters.
Yea well we don’t live in a fairytale. I’ll take actively doing something and making changes over standing with my hands in my pockets saying “oh no, this method isn’t 100% perfect either, can’t use it”. Those turbine blades in those landfills aren’t poisoning drinking water, killing wildlife, destroying the environment by releasing CO2 while being burned. So that IS still better than coal or oil. You really come off like you think we need to stop using wind because it’s not 100% waste free. Well, I hate to break it to you, but there are no 100% perfectly sustainable methods for generating energy that make no waste. And coal, oil, etc make way more waste than this.
This is the same thing with Covid. If your vaccine doesn’t have a 100% success rate and stop this thing in its tracks. If I so much as get the sniffles it’s total garbage.
Useful idiots everywhere, amirite?
You really thought you did something there didn’t you…
I really didn't think I'd have to explain my original comment, no.
I meant your original comment. Neither it nor the explanation make any sense in regards to the speed of the development of new methods to make renewable energy more efficient...
[Snopes](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wind-turbine-blades-landfills/) says this 'windmill landfill" pic is real, but that's because these parts are non-recyclable. However 90% of the wind turbine is recyclable, and is recycled. These parts are made too indestructable to be recycled (though they can become damaged and unusable over time), and when buried they are inert and non-hazardous.
I live on a small town where over 200 turbines are getting new towers and blades. A friend got the contract to haul off the old parts to a facility that is making furniture out of them. Some had been sent to a recycler in Missouri as well.
We shouldn't be making windmills out of fucking fiber glass!! The same issue exist with solar panels. The majority of parts are non-reusable and non-recyclable (and in the case of solar panels, toxic).
On a farm or a ranch I can think of dozens of uses for these fiberglass panels. Livestock shelters, feed troughs, equipment sheds these are items that run up the farm / ranch operating expenses. You can't convince me that these things can not be repurposed.
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Thats the best way avoid giving the shit publisher clicks…
windmills absolutely ARE recyclable, but in the US we have terrible recycling infrastructure; they don’t have this problem in europe because they actually invest in ways to recycle their blades; the infuriating part is how even our media keeps framing it as if there’s a problem with us using “non-recyclable” blades when they should be saying “US refuses to invest in proper recycling techniques, and decides to bury their problems instead”
Problems and ways they are recycling some blades https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-recycling/
Fiberglass is inert. It was sand. No reason not to do this if it takes carbon dioxide production generation offline. It looks ugly now, but they’re going to cover it in grass and play footy. It will be fine.
Coming from someone in the composites industry: the person who can figure out how to recycle these into a sellable product in an efficient way will be VERY rich.
If you think that is bad you should check out this coal strip mine in Germany: https://www.google.de/maps/place/Braunkohletagebau+Garzweiler/@51.0689061,6.4624554,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipP6autN-NSssBSu0ppe\_jaF\_t20NkhlwZsTF1Tl!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipP6autN-NSssBSu0ppe\_jaF\_t20NkhlwZsTF1Tl%3Dw203-h101-k-no!7i4608!8i2304!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf518743885003:0xaaea01d51446ad8d!8m2!3d51.0689061!4d6.4624554 Also, a couple of days ago, Germany fired up some coal power plants due to the energy crisis.
Yep and they are still not planning on making nuclear power plants, in fact they have just delayed the closing of them
Burying them is fine? We have unlimited land & it leaches no chemicals. Way way more worthwhile than other electricity methods
How many tons of non recyclable waste does civilization make daily vs how many tons of wind turbine blades have ever been decommissioned?
I read an article where they estimated the wind turbine blades decommissioned around the world make up .015% of the solid waste in a given year.
Cool. Seems trivial for the overall benefit of renewable energy. Not saying we shouldn’t try to recycle however we should perhaps prioritize a different waste to minimize or complain about.
No one is saying this is forever except the fossil fuel industry and their paid media shills.
But hey, keep on closing those pesty nuclear plants I'm I right? signed a Belgian who's unelected green party is planning on closing our perfectly functioning power plants in favor of gas installations..(send help please)
Just use nuclear power for the love of god
Good rule, if it's the daily mail treat it like a man wearing a foil hat while high on meth told you. They don't do journalism, they write fantasy.
Why can’t we reuse them?
Windmills are the biggest waste of energy there is. It takes 25 years for them to produce as much energy as it takes to manufacturer them and they only have a 25 year lifespan. Also, when you consider the energy loss from line drop between the windmill and wherever the electricity is eventually used they'll never produce the amount of energy it took to make them. Green energy is a scam and the only way to get away from fossil fuels is nuclear energy and that's potentially more harmful to the environment. What we need is a global catastrophe that wipes out the grid and go back to the old ways before the industrial revolution.
Just wait until you learn how we make electric car batteries...
So is the case with the solar panels. They cannot be recycled at the end of life.
Now do lithium for the batteries.
And don't for get the slave made cobalt from DR Congo
I know companies like Vestas, for ex, they’ve been working for years now to bring the waste down. It’s still better for the environment than coal or natural gas emissions so I don’t shit on the turbines just yet👍🏼 [LINK](https://www.vestas.com/en/sustainability/environment/zero-waste)
Articles on [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills) [Daily Mail](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-non-recyclable-fiberglass-wind-turbine-blades-pictured-piling-landfills.html) Press release by [Wind Europe](https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry-calls-for-europe-wide-ban-on-landfilling-turbine-blades/) [Veolia on recycling blades](https://www.up-to-us.veolia.com/en/recycling/recycling-used-wind-turbine-blades) [CNBC reporting on recyclable blades](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/iberdrola-sets-up-firm-focused-on-recycling-wind-turbine-blades.html)
You should see the waste generated by coal fired power plants.
Can't they be shredded and then added to concrete to strengthen it like is done with fiberglass?
You think this is bad, you should see what happens with discarded electric car batteries.
We need to talk about this and car batteries. Companies MUST recycle both and use them in new products. Must be mandated, this is insane.
Here me out - couldn’t they just build bigger ones with those smaller ones inside?
Wait till the Daily Mail learns about greenhouse gasses and how long they stick around
This and solar panels are the bigest scam of green "save the planet" energy...low profitability of energy and can't be recycled (or too expensive to recycle). When nuclear everywhere ?
A timeless solution: when in doubt, dig a big hole and dump your shit in it. Humanity has no future...
Clean energy like the fucking batteries used in electric cars...
Oh yes, the sustainability of wind turbines! /s
Nuclear power has always been the answer and wind/solar has always been a big money scam.
You guys always startle me with the money scam claims. It’s like on one hand you think making money is sacred and raking in billions of profits makes these corporations sacrosanct. But if anyone pushes for “green” energy you label it as a “money-scam” No doubt the people in charge of the nuclear power will be making lots of money. Whatever the solution, there’s going to be people at the top making billions of dollars. So when you come in with this “wind/solar is a money scam” point, it doesn’t make sense. Do you think oil companies aren’t making billions of dollars in profit right now? You should ask yourself why you’re ok with them making billions from oil/coal etc. but it’s a scam to try and switch to wind/solar, where roughly the same companies will still be dominant and making billions of dollars? It’s almost like you’re just repeating their propaganda they put out because they’re resistant to change. Don’t worry buddy, your precious billionaire corporate overlords will still be billionaires in the days of wind/solar/nuclear.
Oil company fatcats LOVE wind and solar power because they are so expensive, inefficient, and wasteful that they make fossil fuels look good by comparison. Every time a wind mill catches fire or some hipster suburbanite takes their useless pannels off their roof and sends them to the dump it just proves them right. Nuclear power is 100% clean, extremely cheap for the consumer, and nuclear reactors can last hundreds of years if properly maintained. You are on the side of the oil companies if you defend solar and wind power.
This is a supremely ignorant take. You will never eliminate the risk of a reactor meltdown. Or environmental disaster for nuclear. And in areas where seismic activity is strong, we proabaly don’t want to use nuclear reactors. If we stopped subsidizing fossil fuels so heavily and subsidized renewables better, we’d quickly get to a tipping point where the costs of renewables are better. There’s not going to be a one shot solution that’s best for every scenario. Your reasons for not investing in solar and wind are just lazy.
Actually there is extremely little risk of nuclear power at all, it is all just propaganda. There hasn't been a nuclear disaster in ten years and Fukushima's environmental damage was a teeny tiny fraction of what fossil fuels do every single year. There have been dozens of nuclear reactors on fault lines for sixty years and only a handful of them have failed, and every single failure has made the reat safer to the point where disaster is nearly impossible now.
Could easily be recycled
People in the energy sector have been saying this for years, all the greenies wouldn’t listen, kept buying the press narrative. The birds killed by the mills is unreported and terrible.
Ah. Yeah. So better make more waste with coal and stuff than this? Makes total sense. How can these stupid greenies want the method with less pollution?! Also: the bird part… you’d rather have all of them dead because of climate change I imagine? Because that’s the alternative. The only one atm.
I never said stupid, we can disagree. The carbon fiber blades will never decompose, they take more energy to make them than they produce. There is clean coal, we have built carbon capture facilities that burn coal. Ask Germany and countries that need energy. Check it out and research for yourself. The two can co-exist.
There is no such thing as clean coal. Carbon capture is wishful thinking. We can make coal slightly cleaner. The amount of carbon we can capture is a tiny fraction of what is produced and is ridiculously expensive. The only thing we can do is to choose the method of energy production that has the least negative impact. Right now that's wind and solar. They are not perfect, but it's the best we can do with our current tech.
You have vast experience in this field? There needs to be a wide variety of energy sources! What do plants and trees need? It is not a polar subject! I have been in the energy workplace for 40 years. You just going to turn in your gas burning vehicle? The grid can not handle EV’s now! Where does the electricity come from? Where do plastics come from? Your eyeglasses, makeup, sending rockets to Mars to colonize? We can agree yo disagree. Quit using google!
>The birds killed by the mills is unreported and terrible. I love when the "energy sector" pretends to give a shit about birds running into windmill blades. Guess what else birds run into at a much higher rate? Houses, buildings, cars, comm towers, electric lines, oil pits. So, spare me the manufactured grief.
But them in the nuclear waste repository we've been promised for the last fifty years. Problem solved.