The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

Promising news on the wind turbine front:  A Danish wind turbine giant has just discovered how to recycle all rotor blades, CanadaToday.

The assertion is that Vestas has discovered a chemical treatment that can break down the epoxy in the blades and this enables the components to be reused, keeping them out of landfill. Even better, this should also work in other industries where epoxy is a problem.

I read something about this a couple of weeks ago, it's a spin off of a technology that also being touted for disassembly and recycling of mobile phones as well as other polymer based products or adhesives. For example of they switch to the right type of adhesive for phones or SolarPV they can have them self-disassemble.

There is a catch though, it basically uses a sodium hydroxide derivative, which itself is a very very nasty chemical(paint stripper), so when the process chemicals are exhausted you have recovered one lot of waste only to generate a whole lot of another. The claim is the new waste isn't waste but can be used for other industrial process, but the more I read the more it became a pass the waste(parcel) scenario. Some poor bastard at the end of the food chain was left holding the bag for every previous process!

There is another group that has developed a way to reduce polymer and epoxy components to solids and gas using solar powered furnaces that process polymers / plastics in inert atmospheres. This is also being touted as a solution, but in reality they have only ever processed materials in batches of grams.

In some respect the world has gone crazy, the engineers retire these turbine blades long before they are done, in much the same way they scrap aircraft before they crash. It doesn't make sense, the turbines sit mostly in abandoned or rural spaces populated by a few sheep or cattle, they should be just leaving them in place until they fail, but instead they replace them at regular intervals and store the old blades as waste for future recycling. It's a bit bizarre, but easy to understand when you see the big dollars involved for making and programmed maintenance of a wind turbine!