They can be recycled, but as usual market liberalism won't change anything unless bourgeois overlords can profit.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact-check-recycling-can-keep-wind-turbine-blades-out-landfills/8647981002/
The catch here is that while wind turbine blade recycling is technically possible, landfill disposal remains the most cost-efficient and accessible option in many cases.
I read somewhere that windmill blades will make up 1% of landfill volume by 2050, very cool
Absolute madness that we let the "market" dictate recycling. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Unless it's unprofitable.
Surely the market won't minimize its costs by offloading them as an unpriced public detriment.
And reduce and reuse being the more important but less popular ideas.
don't be silly wind turbnes with unrecyclable fiberglass blades powering 9000 pound electric hummers to drive 3/4 of a mile down a 5 line stroad to pick up a frappacino is totally green and sustainable as hell bro
I've learned about this before. Of course, chuds are using it as proof that pollution is in fact, a good thing and we should forget all about this green stuff.
Chuds becoming pro-wind power because they think turbine waste is like running their F-150 without a catalytic converter.
They can be recycled. But.
Say you have 1 lb of fiberglass scrap sitting on your desk (a 12″ square of 1⁄8″-thick, cured, chopped-fiberglass laminate). And let’s say you have to get rid of it because it’s junk. You can do two things:
- Tape three pennies to the scrap and set it outside the door of your plant. Someone will come to take it away, and you can simply go about your business.
Or, if you feel compelled to recycle, you can:
- Tape a quarter to that piece of scrap, walk a mile down the road, and give it to the recycle man who’s waiting there to take it from you. Then, walk all the way back to finish your day.
Which are you going to do, really?
It's always been economically feasible to build with sustainable materials, and always will be:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html
Now enjoy going down a rabbit-hole on that site.
Doesn't even talk about how much energy is produced with wooden blades smfh
It's kind of the closest you can get to an-prim while still being reasonable and coherent.
:wtf-am-i-reading: dear god what are they made of? not like, laminated metal?
:trump-anguish: ITS FUCKING PLASTIC LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO
im so fucking jokerfied i've always had the worry of wind insufficiency and too slow adoption but lmao propping up the oil industry :chefs-kiss: gotta hand it to ya hellworld, that is ART
It's epoxy - fiberglass composite. Epoxy, like silicone, can't be melted down and recast, once it's cured you can do is burn it.
Meanwhile we've known for decades how to turn the waste from an enriched uranium nuclear reactor (that normally takes thousands of years to decay) into energy and waste that decays in only 20 years. It's just not profitable.
They would make it profitable by selling it to right-wing death squads to set off dirty bombs in Venezuela anyway
Well, Uranium mining is real bad, as since it's so scarce and you need to refine the right rare isotope out of the ore, you need to dig a lot.
A bigger worry is its still limited; current tech at current (low) usage, it's estimated there's only 90 years left of uranium. Better tech will improve that, but unless we figure out something like pure thorium, nuclear won't power the world. (fwiw, current expirimental thorium still uses uranium to enrich the thorium. Still more efficient, but it's main draw is that it's safer).
I wonder how many years of power we could get by burning up all the plutonium in existing nuclear weapons
carbon fiber would be better but its more expensive, from my understanding
so important note, just because we can't economically recycle them now, doesn't mean that we will never be able to recycle them ever
Plus we're not even locked into fiberglass as a building material
Unsustainable development is bad but wind power has the potential to be good
isnt that pink stuff in your wall ground up fiberglass? is there a reason it cant become that?
You'd have to burn off the resin, purify the glass, and extrude it into fibers. So maybe, but it's probably not cost effective over making fiberglass from virgin materials.
Other comments on this thread pointed out how that those types of blades are recyclable but "capitalism."
Also, a bit of the "all new things are just as bad as the old things so its bad to do new things" that's a bit exhausting.
Hey, I get it. I'm cynical and irony poisoned like everybody else.
But the sales people and reactionaries tend to frame and blame "green" energy as "miracles". Everybody else is just trying not to die.
A saw a photo of them being used as material for a small bridge once
Simply put a price on waste. Simple as that, Jack. Price the waste, save the planet. You fools. You tankies.
How do you come up with a landfill much less have whole of civilisation go with it
There's also the erosion of microplastics from the blades while in operation: https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2021/10/19/microplastics-from-wind-turbines/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/we.2540 https://docs.wind-watch.org/Leading-Edge-erosion-and-pollution-from-wind-turbine-blades_5_july_English.pdf
And the infrasound generated while in use https://eric.ed.gov/?q=a&pg=3656&id=EJ932839
I saw them being hollowed out and repurposed as bus stop coverings but there’s a limited demand for that lol.
Rigid sails have been done, but they're usually symmetrical: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsail
It says the main spar is carbon fiber, not sure about the rest. Fiberglass would be heavier and not as strong as carbon fiber, so you might need a heavier keel and/or some reinforcement.
That makes sense. I wonder if they would have more or less stress on a sailboat, and what a mechanical failure would look like.
