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Europe's Wooden Wind Turbine Blades Could Be The Answer To Fiberglass Pollution (www.bgr.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Wind turbines are already recyclable so this tile is just misinformation

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  • [–] 30 points 2 months ago

    If you, read the article, you can see that while it technically can be recycled it's low quality glass with glue. ",Regardless of how the blades are made, engineered wood is easier to recycle than fiberglass. The glass fibers in fiberglass are trapped within a thermoset resin. Recovering it can require shredding, grinding, or chemical treatments. One energy-intensive process, pyrolysis, uses heat with no oxygen to separate the glass fibers from the polymer. " Glass is cheap and barely worth recycling.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Recyclable doesn't mean that it's worth recycling them. Look for "wind turbine graveyards" (but also beware, there seem to be a lot of AI generated images -.-).

    However I also don't see how these wooden versions are much better. According to the article they are glued together using epoxy. They propose grinding it down and making other stuff with it. I guess in the best case it gets burned in the end.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Wood powder can be mixed with epoxy and formed into shtuff

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    True, that's what they propose in the article, but it's not like you get pure wood powder back, it's a wood-epoxy powder mixture. To which you then add epoxy to make new stuff... at some point you just have a mass of epoxy with traces of wood. That's downcycling at best.

    Not sure how serious/scientific the author of the article is, as they also propose using the powder as mulch, which sounds like an ecological nightmare when considering that it's mixed with epoxy. But that might not have been the idea of the engineers who designed the wooden blades.

    I'm not saying this technology is bad, even if the wooden blades get burned in the end at least they are not left as landfill like the ones right now.

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