Germany Won’t Recycle Wind Turbines:That’s 1.35 MILLION Tons of Hazardous Waste
Germany began installing wind turbines in earnest some 20 years ago. Now that their life has been exceeded, many are being ripped down. But there’s a big problem about what to do with the leftover carbon and glass-fiber reinforced blades.
A recent report on ZDF German public television explains that currently there’s no plan in place on what to do with the turbine blades, which weigh up to 15 tonnes each.
There’s no way to recycle them to use as raw material for new blades. Currently, the old blades are being shredded and the chips mixed in with concrete.
“You need too much energy and power to shred them,” says Hans-Dieter Wilcken, the operator of a German recycling company.
Burning them is also not an option.
Hazardous waste
The problem with chopping them up is that dangerous carbon fiber particles are produced and pose a threat to human health. Used wind turbine blades have been designated hazardous waste and no one knows how to deal with them.
Currently, 30,000 wind turbines are in operation across Germany and many will have to be dismantled over the next 20 years. That volume alone means over a million tonnes of hazardous waste (30,000 turbines x 3 blades/turbine x 15 tonnes/blade = 1.35 million tonnes).
By 2100, with wind turbine use expected to rise, millions of tonnes of non-recyclable hazardous waste will be left for future generations to deal with – that’s in Germany alone.
Bloomberg: Massive waste “forever”
In the USA, Casper, Wyoming, is currently serving as a landfill for used blades, Bloomberg here reports:
‘The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,’ said Bob Cappadona, chief operating officer for the North American unit of Paris-based Veolia Environnement SA, which is searching for better ways to deal with the massive waste. ‘Most landfills are considered a dry tomb.’
‘The last thing we want to do is create even more environmental challenges.’
On top of the hazardous wind turbine blade waste, there’s also the problem of the massive steel-reinforced turbine foundations, which are simply being swept under a layer of dirt as well. These, too, will forever have an impact on ground and groundwater.
Legacy of waste, breathtaking stupidity
Future generations will wonder how dumb their ancestors must have been to opt for a form of energy that blighted the landscape, destroyed ecosystems over vast areas, killed avian wildlife, was an unreliable and expensive energy source, made nearby residents sick, and left millions and millions of tonnes of waste behind.
Never mind all the solar panel waste that is about to be added to that.
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Alan
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America is burying blades in the desert. We have Attenborough, the royal princes and most celebrities promoting renewable energy and they haven’t a clue about the technology. Attenborough doesn’t even know why walruses are falling off cliffs, and thinks it is due to climate change.
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Andy Rowlands
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A classic case of where supposedly ‘green’ things turn out to be anything but green.
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JaKo
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Where is this, what’s its name… eh, “common sense?”
When you buy car tires, you have to pay a little “recycling fee,” when you buy a car battery, you better bring in the old one as that fee would skyrocket — these may constitute a good practice, or at least there’s some common sense in them, right?
However, when you buy/install a wind turbine or a photovoltaic panel, do you have to put down a deposit on recycling? Au contraire, you get a subsidy instead! There you go, an uncommon nonsense… (I also wonder, where do the government accountants shuffle these extra costs? Together with subsidies, I hope.)
Cheers, JaKo
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