Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about recycling wind turbine blades. Although recycling it’s often confused with reuse.
Reuse means taking the blades themselves, after some modifications, to create structures with different uses. This is the case with the famous playgrounds we’ve talked about or the well-known bicycle parking I’m showing below.
However, true recycling means recovering the raw materials from the blades and using them in another manufacturing process. This has been the case with the Second Wind Project, a collaboration between Siemens Gamesa and Resolve Composites, this project has built a boat using fiberglass recovered from Siemens Gamesa wind turbine blades, demonstrating the feasibility of this type of process.
To recover the fiberglass, they used a process called ReceTT, which claims to reduce the solvent needed by 70%. You can read more information here.
Of course, this is a pilot project, but it’s a clear demonstration of the feasibility of recovering these materials and using them in a real-world application.
