Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills (bloomberg.com) 145
Vestas, the world's largest producer of wind turbines, says it has developed a chemical solution that allows the blades -- made with durable epoxy resin -- to be broken down and recycled. Bloomberg reports: "This signals a new era for the wind industry," Vestas said in a statement. If it's implemented at scale, the technology can be used on both old blades sitting in landfills and those in active wind farms, the company added. It's a potential solution for what could be a massive sustainability problem for the wind industry. Industry body Wind Europe has previously estimated that about 25,000 metric tons of blades a year will be decommissioned by 2025, rising to 52,000 tons a year by 2030. The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.
Vestas's process is the result of joint initiative including Denmark's Aarhus University and US-based Olin Corp. The company now plans to move it from the lab to a pilot project for two years, before rolling it out on a commercial scale. Its cost hasn't been disclosed.
Vestas's process is the result of joint initiative including Denmark's Aarhus University and US-based Olin Corp. The company now plans to move it from the lab to a pilot project for two years, before rolling it out on a commercial scale. Its cost hasn't been disclosed.
In before the idiots who don't understand context. (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans produce over 50 MILLION tons of electronic waste a year.
Even if we go the completely generous route of 100 THOUSAND tons of wind turbine blades a year, we would be hardly making a dent.
We're much better off forcing companies to make things repairable. I can live with 100 THOUSAND tons of wind turbine "waste", if we can even get rid of 1 MILLION tons of electronic waste.
Re:In before the idiots who don't understand conte (Score:4, Insightful)
YOU can live with 100K tons of wind turbine waste.
Because YOU don't HAVE TO live with it.
It gets chopped up and/or dumped into a landfill FAR from where you're at.
Reducing waste at every point of product life is desirable.
And trying to prioritize one form of waste over another is a false choice.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In before the idiots who don't understand conte (Score:5, Interesting)
"It's pronounced 'Dumass' " ;)
Seriously, though, I don't get what this is supposed to even mean.
Okay, so you're going to use chemicals to dissolve the epoxy. So now you have the fibreglass cloth. But I doubt that you can just reuse it after all this time being stressed, and then acid-exposed, and then re-manufactured; its strength / lifespan should be much weaker (and - key - much less predictable). So what then? Well, you could melt it back down to make new, high quality fibreglass. But wherein, what's the point? If you're going to chop it, acid soak it, then take the glass out and melt it, then why not just chop it, incinerate it, and then melt the recovered glass? Is acid treatment really that superior to incineration (with flu gas scrubbing)? Maybe somewhat, but I can't see it as being radically different.
Plus, you don't have to do either; there's already products out there that require less processing steps. Concrete is the main one; incinerated chopped fibreglass is not just fill, but improves concrete properties. Another is fibreboard, which doesn't even involve incineration, just finely chopped fibreglass mixed in with binder. And both products can command a premium for being recycled and eco-friendly products rather than made from virgin materials.
The biggest problem with wind turbine blades thusfar has been... to put it simply... there's just not that many. Economic efficiency requires scale. Handling blades by hand, individually, with irregular supply, is never going to be economical. You want a large, steady supply of blades in order to justify large, high-throughput processing machinery and steady supplies of products for consumers. Lacking this, the most economically-efficient thing you can do with blades is.... just accumulate them, until you reach the point that you have enough to justify large-scale processing.
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YOU can live with 100K tons of wind turbine waste.
Because YOU don't HAVE TO live with it.
It gets chopped up and/or dumped into a landfill FAR from where you're at.
Reducing waste at every point of product life is desirable.
And trying to prioritize one form of waste over another is a false choice.
He has a point. Getting your panties in a twist over 100k tons of windmill blades and ignoring 50 MILLION tons of electronic waste is stupid. It is stupid for the same reason that hunting down and jailing small time shoplifters with all the obsession of captain Ahab while allowing white collar criminals to continue stealing billions is stupid. You will always be better off concentrating on eliminating your problems starting with whatever is causing the most damage and working your way down the list. Small
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Previously, we *could not* recycle turbine blades, and now we can.
Now we can ignorantly chose to not recycle both of them despite our ability to do so, bringing our wastefulness on to a more even footing.
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It is stupid for the same reason that hunting down and jailing small time shoplifters with all the obsession of captain Ahab while allowing white collar criminals to continue stealing billions is stupid. You will always be better off concentrating on eliminating your problems starting with whatever is causing the most damage and working your way down the list. Small fry should come last.
Then again, lots of small things can add up. Shoplifting is a problem larger than any one shoplifter, but, you're right, going after the entire population of shoplifters, while easier, is inefficient. In cases like this, it would be better to find ways of preventing the issue as a whole. In the other hand, white-collar criminals are (probably) fewer, but finding and prosecuting them is often expensive and time-consuming. Arguably, finding ways to prevent those crimes would help too. As an aside, compar
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On the other hand many people who try to diss wind energy because of blades that aren't easily recyclable don't acknowledge that existing power plants have their own problems - what to do with coal ash waste, how to recycle the old turbines, what about the nuclear waste. Similar with blades hitting some birds, the fossil fuel industry kills vastly more birds overall, the hydroelectric dams are killing fish, etc. Reducing waste is good, but it's being used in a one sided effort to push back against renewab
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And trying to prioritize one form of waste over another is a false choice.
No it's not. There are orders of magnitudes of differences between various wastes and their affects on ... well everything, environment, smell, health etc.
In fact every western country in the world has regulations forcing prioritisation of forms of waste because they recognise that not all forms of waste are equal.
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Do you understand a conditional statement, you illiterate piece of shit?
Do you understand that making repairable wind turbine blades is not interchangeable in effort with recycling them? Right now it's not proven to be possible to repair big structural components made with epoxy and composite materials. If they were made from aluminum or steel they would not perform as well and would require a much larger tower to hold the weight. If they were made from titanium they would exceed our current manufacturing capabilities and the blades would need to be made in multiple pieces then
Re:In before the idiots who don't understand conte (Score:4, Insightful)
Dumbass
illiterate piece of shit
Fucking learn ENGLISH, dipshit.
illiterate cunt
you dumb piece of shit
You seem like a pleasant fellow.
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Dumbass
illiterate piece of shit
Fucking learn ENGLISH, dipshit.
illiterate cunt
you dumb piece of shit
You seem like a pleasant fellow.
Welcome to the Anglosphere where hardly anybody is able to form a sentence that does not contain at least one expletive because throwing profanity at any argument is an instant debate winner.
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I don't know about "winner", but the catharsis should not be underestimated.
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They literally did present themselves as evil. Check the username.
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Wind turbine waste will reach 6.5 million metric tons in a few years.
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Sounds like we should do nothing now and wait for the problem to come to a head. Seems to have worked for global warming, zoonotic diseases, and the Baltics.
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In the waste problem needs to be attacked from multiple angles. Every closed system you can find is the low hanging fruit. You can generally get an industry to standardize and work on a scale where things don't get too expensive. Understanding the materials in the thing you are attempting to break down and possibly recycle is important. When you can't identify it, then it goes in a landfill.
For example, recycling lead acid batteries for cars is a closed system. You get a rebate for your old "core" when you
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The plastic and stuff ends up being trash though, but by weight it's mostly lead so I call it a win.
The plastic cases are also recycled. Cars are the most aggressively recycled consumer good, and the battery is the most aggressively recycled part of the car.
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Humans produce over 30 BILLION tons of CO2 a year.
Not really a relevant comparison. CO2 doesn't end up in landfills. Just sayin' ...
the nicest sentence of the summary is (Score:2)
The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.
Re:the nicest sentence of the summary is (Score:5, Interesting)
On one hand, that needs to happen. On the other hand, they're doing this now because they now have a plan for being the only company which can comply with such a regulation, so it would harm their competitors (who would have to license the tech from them.)
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It was always good policy that everything should be recyclable, and/or in general that whoever produced it should be responsible for disposing of it. That this was not already the policy is how we got nonrecyclable turbine blades in the first place. They would have figured out another way to do it.
By the same token, of course, energy producers should be required to fix the same amount of CO2 they emit...
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Are you sure about that?
Yes.
The requirement for blades that can be recycled might have had negative effects on the development of wind turbines and the market for their electricity.
Take away the fossil fuel subsidies and it wouldn't.
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The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.
Who says they're going into landfills anyway?
There's all sorts of people using them as building material. They're white, they're interestingly curvy, they're every architect's dream.
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Who says they're going into landfills anyway?
Everyone. In every article you linked.
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I guess Google served you results based on your history.
I got lots of links to people building things out of turbine blades.
Re:building materials - fire certification (Score:2)
I hear a distant voice, demanding an answer. The voice is the combined voices of the 76 (or is it 77) people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. The question they want an answer to is "do you have a fire resistance certificate for that building material, and public liability insurance cover against it killing your customer's tenants over the expected lifetime of the building?"
The 30-something architect who uses this sort of uncert
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Yeah, let's build houses out of carcinogenic waste.
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Yeah, let's build houses out of carcinogenic waste.
YMMV but I get links to people building bike shelters and bridges out of them, not dwellings.
PS: They're not carcinogenic.
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Like concrete (the silica dust in cement is carcinogenic? Or wood (ditto for sawdust)? Or plaster? Or steel? I'm not sure there are many construction materials that are _not_ carcinogenic.
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But either the tax payer or the people putting up the wind turbines will have to pay for that which will make it even more expensive than today's status quo which is use the subsidies to put up the wind turbines and then abandon them as soon as subsidies run out because they're not profitable.
Re: the nicest sentence of the summary is (Score:2)
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They could always be recycled ... but it was prohibitively expensive and so nobody did it ... ....this just means that it is now merely expensive ...
What about coal ash? (Score:2)
No one seems to care about coal ash ...
Or nuclear waste ...
How much nuclear waste do we have in relation to completely inert fibre glass wind mill blades?
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The spent fuel from nuclear energy production is highly controlled and accounted for, sealed in giant caskets.
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Oh, you want to nitpick about the fact that spent nuclear fuel is at the moment not in "land fills".
Seems you did not get my point ... (*facepalm*)
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Pretending that our nuclear waste has been successfully managed and is no longer a problem is a big part of why people don't trust nuclear. It was sold with lies, and continues to be supported by lies. If you have to lie to support something, guess what? It's shit.
People lie about renewables all the time, so I guess it's shit too.
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Nuclear only looks good with lies. Renewables still look better than nuclear when you only use facts.
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Using FACTS and LOGIC there!
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If you've resisted the facts and logic thus far, what sense is there in repeating them to you?
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If you've resisted the facts and logic thus far, what sense is there in repeating them to you?
You didn't actually show anything quantifiable or comparable. Basically, "some nuclear waste is toxic and expensive to process" ok so what?
How much of it is there? How much does it cost? How does that compare to byproducts from other methods of power generation? It can all be true but also useless without considering the whole picture.
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You didn't actually show anything quantifiable or comparable.
Incompetence is not a good look. There have been dozens to hundreds of these discussions on Slashdot, in which such figures have been presented. Pretending they didn't happen only makes you look ignorant.
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What do you mean no one cares? Neither of those things get sent to landfill and both of them have endless amounts of regulation about how they are handled.
Put your strawman back in field where he belongs.
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Glasses, depending on their composition, can very definitely be not inert - they're vulnerable to leaching to release minerals in the glass into pore waters (which may or may not
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On the one hand you describe ashes as being essentially glass, as if that means they're inert. On the other hand you describe the same ash sitting in settlement ponds as "leaching [into groundwater]", which is definitely not an "inert" behaviour.
Two points. First is there is fly ash and bottom ash. Fly ash is the fine particulate that comes out with the flue gas at the "top" of the boiler. It is filtered out by either electrostatic precipitators or giant filters. Bottom ash is (in the plants I have experience with) is literally cooled molten silicate (IE glass) containing the trace elements you mentioned. They are too heavy to be carried out of the boiler by the combustion process, and are removed from the bottom of the boiler. They are very diff
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If bottom ash is made with minerals "too heavy to go up the flue", then how come Greenland ice cores have a measurable, significant signature of lead minerals that increases substantially at the time that the Romans took over Britain (and particularly, the lead mining and processing industries of the Peak District)?
The maj
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I would assume, based on your name and comments, you're some sort of geologist. Either by hobby or occupation. So you're probably well more qualified than I to answer most of those questions. I'm a computer nerd, but I spent about 5 or 6 years crawling around various power plants out in North Dakota. I also can't tell if you're trying to troll me, or asking honest questions. I assume, for now, it's the latter so I'll add what detail I can.
If bottom ash is made with minerals "too heavy to go up the flue"...The majority of the heavy metals may go into the "bottom ash" compared to the "fly ash", but it's a partition not a clear separation.
Agreed. From what I understand, it's not the composition of the mat
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Most archaeologists & climate scientists ascribe the ~100CE to 500CE increase in Greenland ice lead contents to the Romans, because it aligns with their records (taxation, silver production) of the industry. However they got enough particulates up the flue, they did it. With chimney stacks probably no higher than 10m.
regarding "fly ash" versus "bottom ash", I would
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I would expect that you couldn't take two sample compositions and say, confidently, that this one is fly ash, and that one bottom ash
Honestly, you can tell by looking at it. Fly ash is the consistency of talc, and is a cream colored. Bottom ash is about the consistency of gritty sand, 1mm ish if I had to guess, and is deep black. When I say it's glass, I'm not exaggerating. It looks like ground up volcanic glass. They literally use it for sand traps at golf courses. [tripadvisor.ca] Sorry for the stupid tripadvisor link, I couldn't find a better pic.
Oh, and the used filters are going to be a disposal problem too.
They "pump" the flue gas through a shower of pulverized limestone slurry. SOx gets "absorbed" and the
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Wh
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Both get put on "land fills" however you want to call it.
Or do they magically disappear?
We probably have somewhere in the range of 1000 times to 1 million times more coal ash than wind turbine blades: but no one cares. So? Why care about wind turbine blades?
Re:What about coal ash? (Score:4, Informative)
Most "nuclear waste" is fuel that has gone from 99% pure to 95% pure (approximations). We're still using nuclear power plants that can't use it, because the NIBYS (and NIYBYs) won't let new ones be built, so the same old barely-safe ones get extended for decades. "Spent" nuclear fuel is just fuel that can't be used by the old style reactors, but it still has plenty of energy left. And most of the worst of it is short-lived isotopes with half-lives of a few years to a few hundred years. The shorter the half-life, the higher the energy.
Meanwhile, these used wind blades are fucking enormous. They get rolled down the highway one at a time, only limited in size by how big of a single blade can be transported by road. My mind boggles at the amount of "chemicals" it will take to dissolve even one of these things. And I'm sure that most of them were still usable before being chopped up, they're just not the size that the shiny new turbines need, time to throw them away.
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I've ben thinking for a few years now, some super-cash-positive company like Apple should swoop in and as efficiently as possible suck up the entire nuclear waste industry and just stockpile it.
There will be a one-time race for it (as there was with used fryer grease) and there will be a one-time bump of availability -> cash.
The reason I say a lot of cash on hand is necessary is that you still have to store it correctly until then. Still, thats a LOT of energy just sitting around.
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Most "nuclear waste" is fuel that has gone from 99% pure to 95% pure (approximations). We're still using nuclear power plants that can't use it, because the NIBYS (and NIYBYs) won't let new ones be built, so the same old barely-safe ones get extended for decades. "Spent" nuclear fuel is just fuel that can't be used by the old style reactors, but it still has plenty of energy left. And most of the worst of it is short-lived isotopes with half-lives of a few years to a few hundred years. The shorter the half-life, the higher the energy.
It's not just about NIMBY, its about private capital being unwilling to invest in nuclear without massive state subsidies, state insurance guarantees and tax breaks. That is literally market players voting with their wallets.
Meanwhile, these used wind blades are fucking enormous. They get rolled down the highway one at a time, only limited in size by how big of a single blade can be transported by road. My mind boggles at the amount of "chemicals" it will take to dissolve even one of these things. And I'm sure that most of them were still usable before being chopped up, they're just not the size that the shiny new turbines need, time to throw them away.
[citation needed]
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It's not just about NIMBY, its about private capital being unwilling to invest in nuclear without massive state subsidies, state insurance guarantees and tax breaks. That is literally market players voting with their wallets.
We've been subsidizing renewables for decades [www.bmwk.de]. How is that "market players voting with their wallets"?
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Most "nuclear waste" is fuel that has gone from 99% pure to 95% pure (approximations).
No idea what yo mu mean with "pure".
Nuclear waste is what remains when you burn "fuel" that contains fissionable products. Usually, about 6% of the "fuel" is fissionable. Usually when roughly half of that is "burned" the reactor stops working.
So the waste is more or less the same as it was before, when it still was fuel. Now it is not fuel anymore. No idea where that American myth is coming from that reactors get emptied
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Are you saying that NIMBYs in China and Russia and many other countries where the rights of the individual are inconsequential to their industrial strategies are preventing them from developing nuclear plants that can make use of all this spent fuel?
Seems strange given that they could make massive profits getting paid to take away nuclear waste and then using it to generate electricity.
Or maybe the technology doesn't work and every attempt to do it on an industrial scale has ended in failure.
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China is putting up a new nuke plant every 6 months. Even with current models, the amount of high energy waste produced is minimal, about 1g per 4MWh produced.
Even if you produced all energy consumed in the US using nuclear (including driving, industrial etc), you'd end up with approximately 100,000 tons of high energy waste. That's 400,000x less waste than current CO2 emissions in the US. Even if you don't re-use it (which it would definitely be possible to do, but perhaps not economical), you can put that
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And yet... They didn't. It's no good angrily ranting about it. How are you planning to make it actually happen?
The US can't even find a coal mine to put its existing waste in.
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Most nuclear waste is very low level radioactive waste that because it is radioactive and from nuclear power can't just be landfilled or recycled, but the amount of radiation is so low if it were from anywhere else it could be ...
The next biggest category is the building and parts of the reactor to be thrown away when they are repaired or dismantled
Spent nuclear fuel is the least bulky, as it is very compact and there is surprisingly little of it ...
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Meanwhile, these used wind blades are fucking enormous. They get rolled down the highway one at a time, only limited in size by how big of a single blade can be transported by road. My mind boggles at the amount of "chemicals" it will take to dissolve even one of these things. And I'm sure that most of them were still usable before being chopped up, they're just not the size that the shiny new turbines need, time to throw them away.
Yeah, they weigh tens of tons. That's almost a significant fraction of the weight of a single house... of which the turbine will power thousands. Whatever will be done with the waste from all of those houses... I mean turbine blades. Now, it is true that a turbine blade does not last as long as a house, but its lifespan is not thousands of times longer. Eventually, all those houses that a turbine blade powers will have to be replaced, generating thousands of times as much waste as one blade. So why so conce
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And metering waste by that metric: makes you an idiot.
Next level: tell us how/where France is storing the waste.
(I save myself the indignity to tell you what you are by using the appropriated derogative)
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On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick. Only 5 grams of this is high-level waste – about the same weight as a sheet of paper.
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Stlll we do not know where to store it.
And my point was: why the hate abot wind turbine blades - which dop nothing - when coal ash or nuclear waste is a real problem?
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I wonder why you think Germany "picked coal ash over used (nuclear) fuel".
Are you an idiot?
Coal ash gor reduced greatly recent years - dumb ass.
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Nuclear waste is relatively small. It is the shielding that makes it seem big. On the other hand, epoxy breaks apart into microplastics which leach into the water table and affect animal life.
The problem with nuclear waste has more to do with its extreme toxicity than it has to do with how much space nuclear waste takes up. Furthermore, if you are going to argue that something as extremely toxic as nuclear waste can be safely stored and wont under any circumstances leach into the water table and affect animal life then you can't argue with a straight face that wind-turbine blades can't be safely stored in landfills or, better yet, safely recycled.
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Furthermore, most of this waste is actually an energy reserve for the next generation of reactors.
As soon as someone builds one such reactor which is commercially viable which runs on such fuel, you can say that, not until. Hint: Nobody has.
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"The fact that the large blades take more energy to make, haul, deploy, maintain, and properly decommission than they ever generate make them a travesty."
Unless you can put numbers on those two, your comment is pointless.
What happened to making them from aluminum? (Score:2)
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They are aluminum composite, not fully aluminum. If they were only aluminum then recycling them would be trivial, especially if you made the rivets out of the same alloy as the blade. It's actually also quite normal now even for things made out of all one material to use structural adhesives (usually polyurethane, but not always) to bond pieces together that could be joined with another method like welding or clinching, just because it's cheaper.
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Epoxy resin is lighter and stiffer than aluminium, which seem to me important properties for gigantic blades hanging from a single point and submitted to large forces. But you are right that if epoxy landfills become a problem, we might have to ask them to design the windmills in another material.
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You write this as if epoxy-carbon fibre composite materials don't also "work harden and become brittle". They do, but at different rates and with a more graceful degradation of properties with time.
The short version is that in composite materials cracks deflect along fibres, which retain their intrinsic strength, then stop ; while in metals (and other crystalline materials) the cracks go zig-zagging along grain boundaries more-or less following (and accentua
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All options not explored (Score:2)
Isn't step 1, after finding that companies won't gobble them up because they're 'worth something' offering them to Universities and Hackerspaces? I know *I* haven't heard of any up for grabs and I know at least six people that'd take 10 or 20 just because that's how they are . . .
I know for CERTAIN I have't seen anyone try to build a house or a building out of these . . . so stop pretending like we've explored options.
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If you're building a premises for single user occupation, and can persuade that user to take on all risks consequent on materials, methods of construction etc ... you might be able to get them used for single one-off builds. By definition, you're talking about housing the 1%, not the 99%, and that's probably not going to be a big enough market to provide a reliable disposal route. You might get rid of the occasional blade like this, but not the ot
This should also work for fiberglass boats. (Score:2)
Many sail and powerboats are made from epoxy resin fiberglass which this would work for. I wonder if there is a way to do it for polyester resin fiberglass hulls.
Not a real problem (Score:2)
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Actually that has been proven to be bullshit. Two major studies concluded that nuclear power plants had nothing to do with those small leukemia clusters. A third follow up study showed there were leukemia clusters where nuclear power plants were planned but never built. How did nuclear cause those leukemia clusters if they were not built? Well they didn't. And it means those nuclear power plants were sited in areas where there was already decades if not centuries of industrial/chemical pollution.
Nuc
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From your link - "1990 NCI report concluded that cancer mortality rates were the same whether a reactor was nearby or not.''
You completely misunderstood the argument. Not surprising from an antinuclear scumbag. Those cancer clusters would occur if nuclear plants were not installed. Correlation != causation. Those plants were sited in areas where there was already industrial pollution.
Radiation is an extremely poor carcinogen. You know what kills people? Air pollution. Opposition to nuclear energy r
Huh. (Score:2)
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I think it's more a dimension problem. Very long and thin. A mobile shredder would fix that problem.
It's also PR optics. The blades wear out and now the green option has just generated a whole bunch of non-degradable plastic waste. It will burn, but all the glass makes for a lot of ash, and it won't burn clean unless you have an afterburner, and probably a scrubber after that.
Everything else above the foundation is recyclable, the blades stand out.
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We have space. We don't have energy.
As usual Slashdot has the absolute worst article on the subject, which is both paywalled and garbage. The goal is to actually recapture the materials used in production and reuse them [compositesworld.com], which would save energy.
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It looks to me that it is more expensive to recycle than to discard in a landfill. Therefore the energy savings are not worth it.
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If that is the case then why they want a government law prohibiting putting used wind turbine blades in a landfill?
I explained that here [slashdot.org]