[creato]

> Today the vast majority of those turbines are not recycled.

I really doubt this is true in any meaningful sense. First of all, I'd expect the majority of all turbines ever produced to still be in their useful service life. Second, many of the materials are valuable as scrap. It would be blatantly idiotic to just destroy and bury these materials, even if your goal is to spite environmentalists. Third, even the unsubsidized cost of wind turbines is not that high. These materials don't just appear out of thin air, they're accounted for in the costs.

[fuoqi]

Today most of wind turbine blades get literally buried in specialized landfills [0]. Companies which produce them promise to boost recycling rate in a decade or so, but right now it's just yet another externality. Proper recycling simply costs more and it's not given that there is enough capacity for materials produced from recycled blades (you can find a similar story with plastic recycling).

[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-no...

[choeger]

There are no rare materials used in the blades.

That being said, yes, the recycling (and presumably also the environmental impact while they are running and constantly weathered) of these composites remains problematic. But they don't end up in land fills in Germany, at least:

https://www.energieagentur.nrw/blogs/erneuerbare/beitraege/r...

[creato]

The post I replied to implied metals and rare earth materials were being thrown away. That is the part I doubt.

For materials like the blades, we need to compare this to alternatives. The lack of recycling may be insignificant compared to the amount of materials consumed by non-renewable power sources (e.g. coal, oil), purely in terms of environmental impact from mining the materials, let alone GHG emissions.

[asien]

Wind turbine have a recommended life time of 20 to 25 years , earlier turbines go even lower to just 15 years.

[techpression]

You would be very wrong unfortunately. There’s currently no way to recycle or reuse the blades and it’s a big problem that nobody seems to care about.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... “Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.”

In Sweden we are making wind power company owners very rich with heavily subsidies, wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.

[stephen_g]

I feel like your argument is the kind that sounds sort of intuitive in isolation, but is nonsensical in context.

How much of the inputs into fossil fuel generators are recycled? Massively more coal, gas, oil etc. is consumed than the amount of wind turbine blades that will go to landfill. Then there’s the byproducts - in Australia, coal ash is literally 22% of all waste generated across the whole country per year. It just goes to landfill!

[techpression]

That is the typical “two wrongs make a right” argument, fossil fuels being bad makes it ok for wind turbines to generate land fill too.l And I answered a statement about recycling of turbines, nothing more.

[adrianN]

No it's a typical "this alternative is better even though it is not a panacea" argument. Nobody argues that it's good that wind turbines produce waste. It's just that the problems caused by wind turbine waste are absolutely trivial compared to climate change.

[stephen_g]

My point is that the people who suddenly seem very worried that wind turbines and other renewables produce a small amount of waste don't seem to care about the fact that fossil fuels produce a huge amount of waste (in addition to the GHG emissions). Same issue as being very worried about renewables using resources (some steel, etc.) when not caring about the huge amounts of resources (especially including the fuel itself!) consumed by fossil fuels.

[7952]

Except people do care and are looking for solutions. Just Google turbine blade recycling to see. Also, storing some inert waste seems pretty mild as an environmental issue.

[shusaku]

> Wind power is carbon-free and about 85% of turbine components, including steel, copper wire, electronics and gearing can be recycled or reused.

That’s a far cry from “no way”.

[asien]

The problem is today no industrial bother recycling them , it’s just cheaper to buy new material.

Those 85% are actually 15% in effective.

[eutectic]

Surely copper at least is worth recycling?

[asien]

The materials are indeed worth recycling but the process is just too expensive and complicated.

Best examples would be devices like phones/microwave/tv they contain lots of those rare materials.

Industrial simply prefer to sell junks for cheap in bulk to the African continent where very poor people burn those junks to extract the rare minerals.

It’s not as simple as « 100% recyclable = Always Recycled »

[cr1895]

>wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.

This is certainly not universally true...for example: https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2019/07/10/vattenfall-...

[hannob]

> There’s currently no way to recycle or reuse the blades and it’s a big problem that nobody seems to care about

The wind power industry cares and is actively asking for political incentives to change this: https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry...

[techpression]

The industry needs political incentives to even exist and now they want incentives to fix the problem the incentives created. Why don’t we just agree on state financed and owned wind power and be done with it instead of feeding the middlemen.

And it begs the question, the waste was a known factor before even starting building turbines, why start asking for this now instead of twenty years ago. To me it feels very much like a problem once wanted to be swept under the rug now becoming too much to handle.

[afarrell]

Because markets carry useful signals. Part of the move to decarbonised energy is creating the free economic systems which support it.