Wind Turbine End of Life Waste

The Great Waste Debate! Let's get some perspective: Wind turbine blade waste vs waste from other composite materials vs waste from coal electricity and municipal garbage. How do the numbers stack up?

Have you seen a lot of recent media reports of wind turbine blades filling up landfills? Perhaps you got the impression that wind turbines produce more waste than other sources of electricity generation, and that they were a major component of all the garbage going to landfill?

I wondered how wind turbine waste stacks up compared to other sources of electricity generation, and other sources of waste. So I crunched the numbers.

In this video I am going to talk about how long wind turbines last, how much waste there is at the end of their lifetime and how much of that can be recycled. Then I’m going to compare the wind turbine waste with the waste produced by coal power plants, and the amount of garbage the average person creates over the lifetime of a wind turbine blade.

The outcome:
If an individual Australian gets all of their household electricity from wind energy, over 20 years their share of non-recyclable wind turbine blade waste is 9kg. That same mass of solid waste is produced by one person’s share of a coal-fired power plant in 40 days, and it is just 13 days of municipal waste.

If you want to see my sources you can find links in this article:
https://medium.com/climate-conscious/wind-turbine-end-of-life-waste-perspective-a561913dcbd9
Note that in this earlier analysis I didn't include recycling for municipal garbage. The recycling rates figures come from these sources:
US https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials#:~:text=The%20recovery%20rate%20for%20recycling,person%20per%20day%20for%20recycling.
Australia https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/f0196d2e-9040-4547-8cb6-8b433923b53d/files/waste-stocktake-report.pdf
Germany https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-recycling-municipal-waste#assessing-the-development
OECD https://www.oecd.org/environment/environment-at-a-glance/Circular-Economy-Waste-Materials-Archive-March-2020.pdf

Sources for images and footage used in the video:
00:13 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-non-recyclable-fiberglass-wind-turbine-blades-pictured-piling-landfills.html?fbclid=IwAR0CCouHpumYZAyidiumxs2glw3zBiawJIjTAq3H0RKObxcjBB7xrddQ6Z0
01:43 Yallourn power plant. Stephen Edmonds from Melbourne, Australia / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
02:16 Inside the nacelle of a Sieman's 2.3 MW turbine. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 24573
02:17 Wind turbine gearbox. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 49418
02:18 The nacelle from a 3-MW GE/Alstom turbine. Photo by Werner Slocum, NREL 62413
02:19 Tower installation for a 2 MW Gamesa wind turbine. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 20839
02:21 Wind turbine foundation preparation. Photo by Gary Harcourt, NREL 35608
02:33 Blades for a 1.5 MW GE turbine installed 2008. Photo by Jim Green, NREL 16179
03:15 Bjarke Ingels' Serpentine Pavilion. Images George Rex from London, England / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
03:22 Fiberline Bridge Koldin
0g, Denmark. S.Juhl / CC0
04:08 EPRI Wind Turbine Blade Recycling: Preliminary Assessment 2020 https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002017711
05:20 https://www.materialstoday.com/carbon-fiber/features/recycling-glass-fibre-reinforced-composites/
05:32 Union Bridge cement kiln tower. Acroterion / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
05:34 Recycling of composite materials. A.A. van Oudheusden 2019. https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:0749ed5c-7aeb-4275-abee-0f904a08ea4d/datastream/OBJ/download
06:00 https://mabe.utk.edu/ut-receives-funding-to-recycle-wind-turbine-blades/
06:52 01:43 Yallourn power plant. Stephen Edmonds from Melbourne, Australia / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
06:53 Tallawarra Power Station. Chongkian / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
06:54 Cofrentes nuclear power plant cooling towers. Photo Roberto Uderio (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
10:13 U.S. Department of Energy https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/Environment%20Baseline%20Vol.%203--Solid%20Waste%20from%20the%20Operation%20and%20Decommissioning%20of%20Power%20Plants.pdf

Видео Wind Turbine End of Life Waste канала Engineering with Rosie