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Not to rain on the parade, but, I just found out a few weeks ago that wind turbine blades are toxic trash when they age out. We just bury them, apparently they're mostly resin and glass fiber and last a billion (or whatever) years leaching in to the ground.

I'm interested why this is a problem. Can't we make the blades out of various exotic metals like wings of the last aircraft generation are? Before the carbon 787 etc? Then we could just recycle them? Or is there a lightning strike issue or something I don't understand?



Your first two sentences contradict each other (turbine blades are toxic but they’re “just glass and resin”). Glass and resin are fairly inert.

Wind turbine blades aren’t toxic. They can be land filled (like almost all waste that isn’t incinerated or plasma gasified), or, if you want to recycle them, they can be used as feedstock for cement kilns or crushed into insulation pellets (which requires a supply chain configured to do so).

https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-rec...


That's fantastic, I only read bad news. Thanks!


Happy to help. PV solar panels are almost fully recyclable too (94% of the way there, the remainder currently can be land filled).

https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/solar-panel-recycling

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling-idUSKBN1J...

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/26/recycling-pv-panels-w...


>Happy to help. PV solar panels are almost fully recyclable too

This is true of batteries too - basically, the stuff dead batteries are made of are far purer than ore, and pretty close to what functioning batteries need due to obvious reasons.


not only that, but the amount of Toxic trash that coal powered or gas powered generators puts out is indescribable compared to the minor amount of toxic trash you can get from a wind turbine. and on top of that, coal releases it into the air...


I would like to mention that these articles claim "renewables generate waste" but they always omit that you can always improve the technology to produce less harmful waste. You can't do that with fossil fuels.

For example. A common complaint is that solar panels are full of leaded solder. What the articles omit is that leaded solder has been banned for more than a decade and the panels they are complaining about are two or three decades old. The articles also generally focus on the most toxic waste even if the most commonly used solar panel types don't contain any of that toxic waste. Thin film cadmium solar panels are "toxic" and everyone agrees but it's a tiny portion of the market. Most solar panels are based on silicon wafers and with some luck you can resurface the top layer of the wafer and use it to make new solar panels. If the frame is made out of aluminum and glass you can recycle that too.


Low Tech Magazine wrote a piece on how to make turbines more sustainable and addresses blade material.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...


As I understand it, the reason turbines aren't made of wood is because performance matters so much - wind speeds are much higher the further up you go, so increasing the height of a wind turbine lets it be closer to high wind speeds (doubling wind speeds gives ~8 times the power!) while simultaneously providing more space for longer blades.

And increasing the length of the blades also provides more than linear improvements - doubling the length of the blades gives something like 4 times the power output.

So you could imagine how hard it is for wood to get traction - suppose that wood means the turbine accesses 10% slower wind speeds and also has 10% smaller blades. If I didn't fumble the maths (0.9^4 * 0.9^8), that would mean only a FIFTH of the energy!

I'm keeping my eye on wooden wind-turbine stuff like Modvion (side note: Modvion are combining wood turbines with a modular, which is really smart as wood is less dense and therefore causes more trucking problems and costs, and making the design modular means they can potentially reduce trucking costs to cheaper than conventional designs instead of more expensive, while simultaneously benefiting from the sunk costs of wood being limited to the size of a tree unless you combine materials together), but they're building a preliminary tower that won't come online until ~2022, so it's not tech that's viable today.

Also, as your article says: Financially speaking, nobody cares unless there's a solid tax on non-recyclable materials or carbon emissions. Wooden turbines are more useful in the real world than they are in the artificial market we live in, which refuses to acknowledge the large cost of our carbon emissions.


You fumbled the math.

>doubling wind speeds gives ~8 times the power

This describes a cubic relationship; 2 cubed is 8.

>doubling the length of the blades gives something like 4 times the power output

This describes a quadratic relationship; 2 squared is 4.

0.9^3 * 0.9^2 = 59% of the energy, much better than the 20% you claim.


All energy production produces some waste and pollution. That's just something we have to live with. And yes, energy efficiency is very good (though things like thicker insulation ALSO causes more waste, so, as everything else, it's a trade-off).

But the degrees to different ways of producing energy cause waste are really vastly different. Compared to spewing out greenhouse gasses and particulates into the atmosphere when burning fossil fuels, waste from wind, solar, and yes even spent nuclear fuel, are really trifling issues. We should do it well, and work on improving recycling etc., but current ways of handling them are vastly better than using fossil fuels.


> I just found out a few weeks ago that wind turbine blades are toxic trash when they age out.

Do you have any information on that, I'd never heard of that being the case?


Here's one of the things I read:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759376113/unfurling-the-waste...

Another comment on this thread says it's all fine and I'm wrong, which is good news.


In your original comment, you’d said “toxic”. toomuchtodo was right to note exactly what your source explains: they’re mostly recyclable (though many places aren’t ready for the blades because they’re so big!) and if not they can be scrapped and left in a landfill. Toxic means something specific, and isn’t just “can’t be recycled”.


Apparently it's just extra fast replacement cycles due to the fact that the original designs weren't thought of this way.




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