I saw an interesting article in Composites World this week about a new parking structure in Lund, Sweden that uses decommissioned wind turbine blades as the main structure of the façade of their building. This structure was commissioned by Lund’s parking company, LKP and was designed by a local architectural firm by the name of Lloyd’s arkitektkontour, obviously a local Swedish architect.
Rendering of Proposed Lund Parking Garage – Composites World 11/11/2024
This article goes on to describe how they made the decision to use end of life wind turbine blades as architectural and structural elements in their building design. To quote the architect Jonas Lloyd “To take something that is perfectly functional, arguably one of the best materials in the world — more or less indestructible — and just bury it in the ground is such a terrible waste.” Apparently Jonas Lloyd became inspired when he read an article about the problem of end of life wind turbine blades going into landfills rather than being reused for something else. If that article was something I wrote I would be quite pleased, but my guess is that there are a number of us that are preaching this message, especially in Europe where they are more environmentally conscious than we are here in the U.S.
In any case, this got me to thinking that I should do some research to see what others have done with used wind turbine blades. I wrote about this a little bit in some previous posts, but I thought for this week I would just focus on the end of life wind turbine blade recycling challenges and the creative uses for them that people have come up with. The article in Composites World goes on to talk a bit about what they are planning on doing with the parts of the blades that they are not able to use in the parking structure, and apparently they are going to be used along roads, highways, and railroads for sound barriers. These are excellent uses of these used fiberglass structures because they will last as long as concrete, probably have more sound deadening capacity, are lighter weight and therefore easier to install, and have a much smaller carbon footprint than making new cement or steel to make these sound barriers.
I have talked about companies like Composite Recycling in the French speaking part of Switzerland that has developed a suite of machines from 40’ shipping container size to full size industrial installations that recycle used wind turbine blades. They take chopped up fiberglass wind turbine blades and, using a low temperature pyrolysis process they call thermolysis, are able to remove the resin from the shopped glass fiber and save both chopped fiber and what they call “pyrolysis oil” which can be readily made into more polyester resin, or into other plastics that require that chemistry. That is one means of recycling wind turbine blades that is quite effective.
What I wanted to talk about in this post is what else can and is being done with used wind turbine blades. These blades are already stiff, strong, and lightweight, so it is certainly possible that they can be used to make primary structure in lots of things. The structures can be lighter weight than steel, faster to build, and have as much stiffness, strength, and more longevity than a new steel structure. In addition, they will require very little maintenance whereas steel requires repainting at set intervals.
As it turns out, what they are planning on doing with them in the parking structure in Lund is just one use of these readily available and very inexpensive fiberglass structures that has been demonstrated and even put into practice. There is a company in Avon, Ohio, Canvus, that is turning decommissioned wind turbine blades into artful outdoor furniture for parks, manicured walkways and trails, and other public spaces around schools, community centers, anywhere there is an outdoor space where people like to sit outside. To make benches, they slice out about a 4’ chunk of the wind turbine blade, hollow out whatever is in the center of the slice if anything, and turn it so that the pointed trailing edge of the blade (pointy edge) is pointing up, and then install seats in the hollowed out center made from recycled plastic and wood. So these are completely sustainable, aesthetically pleasing, and made entirely from recycled materials.
Pics of Canvus Seats and Photo of Canvus’ Showroom (https://www.designworldonline.com/recycled-wind-turbine-blades-make-artful-furniture-for-public-spaces/)
These pieces of furniture are well made, attractive, and will last a very long time. This company got started about 3 years ago. They source their used wind turbine blades from all over the US, wherever there are wind turbines that are being repowered. Quite a bit of this activity is because of the Inflation Reduction Act of the Biden administration because that act provided incentives for existing wind farms to upgrade their older turbines to generate more power from the same footprint. This has provided a ready supply of the used blades for companies like Canvus. The wind blades are sawn into 40’ sections so they can be transported to the Canvus facility, where they are either dropped off for free, or Canvus makes a little money (called a tipping fee) for accepting the wind turbine blades. This is what is driving their growth – they get their raw material for free and make aesthetically pleasing outdoor furniture that they can sell and install at low cost and still make a profit. This is a good example of how this whole process can work for everyone and the wind turbine blades don’t have to go into a landfill.
The leadership of Canvus has a goal of being able to upcycle as much of this material as they can, and it appears from what they have been able to accomplish to date that they are well on their way to success. They provide what they call a Primed and Ready (PAR) furniture product that the community center or urban park can paint in pretty much any color scheme that they wish, to make for a more colorful display that is useful as a bench or picnic table or even just an outdoor sculpture.
Another use for used wind turbine blades besides park furniture is to use a couple of longer pieces of the thick parts of the blades for pedestrian bridge supports in parks that have creeks running through them and other community gathering spaces that span flowing streams. This is starting to be done in Europe where there is also a large quantity of used wind turbine blades that have begun to pile up. And with the environmental regulations in the EU, where they are no longer permitted to landfill used wind turbine blades, these uses have become much more prevalent.
Bridge over the Dungourney River in Ireland (https://www.bladebridge.ie/)
This bridge is in southern Ireland near Cork where BladeBridge is located. BladeBridge is a startup formed in Cork with the goal of repurposing wind turbine blades as bridge supports that are aesthetically pleasing. They are part of the Re-Wind network in Ireland, which is a collection of faculty, students, and staff from five different Universities in Ireland and the US, as well as some industry affiliates, presumably from the European wind energy business. There is quite a bit of offshore wind capacity off the shore of Ireland, so these folks have a ready supply of used wind turbine blades to use to build these bridges.
In another application, a recycling company in Szprotawa, Poland, Anmet, partnered with GP Renewables in Warsaw to build a pedestrian and foot bridge with supports made from used wind turbine blades.
Anmet Foot Bridge Across the Szprotawa River in Poland (https://www.compositesworld.com/news/anmet-installs-first-recycled-wind-turbine-blade-based-pedestrian-bridge)
This project was apparently three years in the making and from what we can see in the pics, what they did was to bolt two wind turbine blades together at the hub connection (where all the guys are sitting) to span the entire width of the river. This is from an article from 2021 in Composites World, and apparently this Polish company had been in business for 5 years prior to the taking of this picture, and is using recycled wind turbine blades to make not only bridge supports but furniture for parks and other outdoor community gathering spaces. They have patented this foot bridge structure, which from what I can tell is unique in that if you use two wind turbine blades bolted together at the strongest spot on the blade, namely the hub, you can span quite a much wider river or stream than you can using the approach that BladeBridge used. From the story in Composites World, what this company did was to create the structure at their facility and transport it to the site where it was installed. This would have been impossible with a wooden truss bridge or a steel girder supported bridge just because of the weight of the overall structure. The wind turbine blades enabled Anmet to transport the entire structure to the installation site to install it.
What Anmet offers the wind energy companies that have used blades is to come to the site of the blades, cut them into manageable lengths, and transport them to their facilities. From there they build their bridge support structures. They can then transport them to the installation site in one piece and use a relatively small crane compared to what a steel bridge would reqiure to install the structure on its foundation. Then all they had to do was to install the walkways on either side of the main structure and they had a bridge. Now that Anmet has built this bridge and has the patents to do this again, as well as the ability to analyze and design a bridge based on the structural properties of the recycled wind turbine blade, they can build these bridges faster and at less cost than traditional steel or wood structure bridges. And the recycled wind turbine blades have a lower overall carbon footprint than using new steel or cut down the trees to make the bridge. All around a winning solution to a looming problem.
Finally, I want to talk a little bit about two companies that are actually separating the resins from the fibers from end of life wind turbine blades, and capturing both the resin and the fiber for reuse. I have talked about Composite Recycling and their fiberglass recycling machines using the process developed by Fiberloop that separates the glass fibers from polyester resins. Their process is the one I’ve written about that nets high quality chopped glass fiber and pyrolysis oil, which means that you get back not only the glass fiber but the resin as well. A large Danish wind power company, Vestas, has apparently developed a process for glass/epoxy composite wind turbine blades. These are the larger blades that were developed for the larger turbines because glass/polyester reached its limit in strength and stiffness when the blades got longer. Vestas, working with Olin (for those of you that know this company they are the gunpowder folks that own Winchester). Olin is one of the larger epoxy resin producers in the EU and they worked with Vestas, the Danish Technological Institute, and Aarhus University to develop this glass/epoxy recycling process that returns both the glass fiber and the epoxy (https://www.brightvibes.com/building-bridges-with-recycled-wind-turbine-blades-could-help-solve-a-major-waste-challenge/). They apparently use a process very similar to what Composite Recycling uses albeit at a temperature appropriate for epoxy rather than polyester. So, this is a bit higher temperature process, but still performed in the absence of oxygen. The article cited above also talks about the creation of and Vestas’ membership in the CETEC (Circular Economy for Thermoset Epoxy Composites) Consortium which is a Europe-wide initiative.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. And of course I welcome a conversation about precision fermentation and what is possible using this technology. My first degree (first love?) is actually biology, which is where I get the organic chemistry background.
I also wanted to let everyone know again that I have finished the first draft of my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. I also added a section about precision fermentation to the book, so it will be in there when it goes to McFarland. My ingoing title is “Close the Circle, a Roadmap to Composite Materials Sustainability”. I am almost at the finish line in preparing the manuscript along with all of the figures, etc. in the manner that McFarland needs to have it to produce the book. I’m going to try to get that done by the end of this year, so the book will most likely come out late next summer or early fall next year.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August, and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. And I’m also working on a condensed version of the book for Kindle readers, so I will let everyone know when that is available as well.
I’ll be back next week with another post.
Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
Shred them and then use it as aggregate for bricks to build a border wall.