Tag: Toxic

Dump & Run: Thousands of Toxic Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up Across America

From STOP THESE THINGS

Across the USA, wind power outfits are being repeatedly busted for dumping their blades and simply cutting and running. Then there are scammers like Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc which makes claims about recycling dumped blades, notwithstanding there is no market for ground up toxic waste, funnily enough.

Principal among the toxic agents to be found in turbine blades is Bisphenol A – a compound banned in numerous countries.

Back in August 2021, Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc was busted for piling up over 1,300 blades at three makeshift dumps in Iowa – despite claiming it would ‘recycle’ them.

It’s a model it has chosen to repeat across the United States, including West Texas where locals are outraged. Stories about recycling blades keep being recycled, while thousands more blades pile up in dumps that resemble ‘green’ energy graveyards.

Russell Gold reports on the American wind industry’s dump and run tactics below.

Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas
Texas Monthly
Russell Gold
24 August 2023

Every year since 1958, the West Texas town of Sweetwater has hosted the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup, which is exactly what it sounds like. Thousands of the venomous ophidians are rooted out of their dens and brought to the Nolan County Coliseum to be gawked at, “milked,” and often beheaded and skinned. It started as a way for the region to rid itself of some of its least-welcome residents. Now community leaders wish they could do the same with several giant piles of scrap that have for too long been left to bake in the sun. But that’s proving to be much trickier than wrangling reptiles.

About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to what is possibly the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives, on the west side of town, in 2017, she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades—between 150 and 200 feet in length and mostly made of composite materials such as fiberglass with a binding resin—kept coming. Each was cut into thirds, with each segment longer than a school bus. Thousands arrived over several years, eventually blanketing more than thirty acres, in stacks rising as high as basketball backboards. Every few dozen feet, a break among the stacks leads into an industrial hedge maze.

“It’s just a hazard all the way around,” Meyer said. She worries about neighborhood children exploring the unfenced piles and says that stagnant pools of water inside the blades breed swarms of mosquitos. Matt Jackson, who works in a nearby warehouse, has other concerns. The piles create shaded nooks and crannies, perfect for Sweetwater’s unofficial mascot. “It’s just a big rattlesnake farm,” he said.

The blades were brought here by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company based in Washington State that announced in 2017 its intention to recycle blades from wind farms across the region. Instead of ending up in landfills, they would be ground up into a reusable material that could be turned into pallets, railroad ties, or flooring panels. Global Fiberglass is one of a few companies attempting to develop a viable business from the impossible task of recycling blades.

Besides the main boneyard—behind Meyer’s apartment—stacks of blades also occupy ten acres a couple miles south of town, and the company is storing blades in other locations in the county. “They have, in my view, abandoned them there,” said Samantha Morrow, the Nolan County attorney. “The county doesn’t have and cannot find millions of dollars to clean this up.”

The Sweetwater piles are also at least partly the indirect result of a rule clarification the Internal Revenue Service issued in 2016. Before then, a wind farm could collect valuable federal tax credits for only its first ten years of operation. But the IRS determined that it would restart the clock on the credits if a wind farm “repowered” its turbines—replacing most of their equipment with newer parts. So, despite the expected two-decade lifespan for turbine blades, wind farms across Texas and other states began replacing many that remained in good shape years early.

Some paid Global Fiberglass to remove the older blades and haul them away. The company set up shop in an empty industrial facility in Sweetwater that was once an aluminum recycling plant, but Don Lilly, the managing director of Global Fiberglass, told me that only a handful of blades have ever been ground up there. He said the company was close to ramping up and would soon mill the blades into pieces the size of coarse sand. “The blade material is sold,” he said, “but I can’t go into that part yet.”

Sweetwater has heard such pledges before. The county declared the stockpile a public nuisance a year ago. City attorney Jeff Allen said Sweetwater’s local ordinances are aimed at overgrown lots, not turbine blades, leaving the city with limited legal options. He said he believes Global Fiberglass “intended to be a viable business” but at some point “it just came off the rails.” (Lilly disputes this and says the delays have come from ensuring “all systems were engineered.”)

The wind industry claims Sweetwater benefits from the local wind farms nearby. Drivers arriving on I-20 from either direction are welcomed by a giant wind turbine blade painted with the town’s name. But even the community’s biggest boosters of renewable energy long ago ran out of patience with Global Fiberglass’s mess. “We’d like to see them gone,” said Karen Hunt, director of the local chamber of commerce. “The sooner the better.”

Sweetwater isn’t the only place Global Fiberglass has stockpiled blades. It has a total of 1,300 in Newton, Iowa, and two other cities in that state, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. After an investigation, the agency concluded in 2021 there was no recycling going on, nor was any likely to happen. It declared the company to be running an unpermitted dump.

Frank Liebl, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation, testified at a state hearing that the initial excitement in 2017 of recruiting a blade-recycling company soon soured. In the intervening years, he asked Global Fiberglass many times when it would begin its recycling. He always got “the same answer: ‘Soon,’ ” he said.

By July 2021, the company owed more than $1 million in unpaid rent in Newton, according to testimony at the Iowa hearing from its landlord’s attorney. In Texas, it failed to pay taxes to Nolan County in 2020 and is now three years in arrears, according to tax records. Last year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the company $10,255 for what it described as illegally stored solid waste. It allowed the company to pay the penalty in monthly installments for three years. In June, Global Fiberglass defaulted, according to the commission.

In Newton, pressure from the state of Iowa seems to have worked. Craig Armstrong, a city employee, said that General Electric recently acquired the blades. It’s unclear whether GE purchased them from Global Fiberglass or from the landlord who was owed the $1 million in rent, who may have taken possession of the blades. The city was promised that they would be sent to a recycling center by the end of the year, although none had been removed by mid-August, according to a Newton city official. Lilly declined to talk about the Iowa blades.
Texas Monthly

Blade Runners: Wind Industry Dumping Millions of Tonnes of Blades Every Year

Hundreds of thousands of toxic wind turbine blades are headed for landfills near you, and thousands more are being dumped illegally, right next door. Across the USA, wind power outfits are being repeatedly busted for dumping their blades and simply cutting and running.

From STOP THESE THINGS

Hundreds of thousands of toxic wind turbine blades are headed for landfills near you, and thousands more are being dumped illegally, right next door. Across the USA, wind power outfits are being repeatedly busted for dumping their blades and simply cutting and running.

In August 2021, we reported on one blade ‘recycling’ company busted for illegally storing hundreds of wind turbine blades at three sites in Iowa. Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc was busted for piling up over 1,300 blades at three makeshift dumps – despite claiming it would ‘recycle’ them.

In Oregon, one so-called wind turbine blade ‘recycler’ was whacked with a $57,282 fine for dumping hundreds of dilapidated blades right next to a natural spring and wetland. It made the bogus claim that the 2,741 cubic yard cocktail of fibreglass and toxic plastics amounted to “clean fill”. The same model has been employed by wind power outfits in New York State.

Whatever happens to them, the wind industry has a monumental problem, that can’t be solved – just buried. Leaving a burden for its hapless victims (aka ‘us’) to suffer for centuries to come. As to which, Ronald Stein poses this rhetorical:

Will Wind Turbines Be Generating More Waste Than Electricity?
The Heartland Institute
Ronald Stein
18 July 2023

Wind turbines, once touted by the few wealthy and less populated countries as a clean solution for electricity, are now becoming an eyesore, a hazard, and a significant environmental threat.

After decades of operating around the world for the few wealthy and less populated countries, wind turbines continue to have a live expectancy of about 20 years.

[Note to Ronald: wind turbines do not last 20 years, their economic lifespan is less than 15 years, with their major components – generators, bearings and blades – often being replaced several times during that period. In the US, one operator is replacing all of its turbines after less than 12 years: Costly & Pathetic ‘Performance’: Thousands of Wind Turbines Being Replaced After 12 Years]

To date there has yet to be discovered a financially viable means of recycling those wind turbines.  As a result, today’s old wind turbines are being dumped into toxic waste dumps.

Because wind turbine blades are very difficult to recycle, the waste stream created by the retired blades is a mounting problem. Globally by 2050 projections are that there will be 43 million tons of blade waste produced EVERY YEAR — the equivalent of 215,000 locomotives.

By the turn of the century in 2100, the world population is projected to be more than 11 billion from its current 8 billion.

  • The world’s population in 2100 is projected to be dominated by India, Nigeria, China, U.S., Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Tanzania.
  • Noticeable by their absence from the population list are countries that are wealthier but less populated like Germany, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Russia.

As wind farms age, the turbines begin to break down and require maintenance. However, due to the high costs associated with removing them, many companies are choosing to leave them in place. This poses several problems, including the potential for oil leaks from the turbines, and the overall negative impact on the landscape.

The first generation of wind turbines are starting to reach the end of their service lives, while others are replaced early to make way for newer technology – including longer turbine blades that can sweep more wind and generate more intermittent electricity – the question of what to do with their huge blades becomes more pressing.

These abandoned wind turbines pose significant environmental and safety risks, as they can leak toxic chemicals and other hazardous materials into the surrounding environment and can even collapse or catch fire.

The life cycle for renewables runs from design, procurement and construction through operations and maintenance, and repair, as well as the life ending decommissioning and disposal or recycling and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition.

It’s time for those few wealthy governments to “clean up” their previous subsidized programs for intermittent electricity and act to subsidize the development of methods to properly decommission wind turbines before they become a larger environmental crisis.

The governments that subsidized the designing and construction have the responsibility to seek decommissioning, restoration, and recycling standards down to the last dandelion, just like we have for decommissioned mines, oil, and nuclear sites.

Wind farms are typically located in areas with consistent wind patterns. For the vast acreage required for wind and solar, it’s pathetic destruction of pristine landscapes!

The American public has been speaking through the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) individuals, and expressing their discontent with such features as unsightliness, extensive acreage requirements, noise, and environmental risks to the community.

For all Americans, Robert Bryce just finished updating the Renewable Rejection Database to include a spate of restrictions or rejections that have been enacted in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio.

  • The new rejection totals: Since 2015, there have been 391 rejections or restrictions of wind electricity projects and 135 rejections or restrictions of solar projects, bringing the total number of rejections of all sites targeted for the generation of occasional electricity to 526.
  • So far in 2023, just in America, there’ve been 24 rejections of wind turbine projects and 24 rejections of solar projects.

Consistent with the NIMBY actions in America to reject so-called renewable electricity, Sweden shocked Europe by abandoning ‘Unstable’ Green Electricity Agenda, and returning to Nuclear Power. Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson cited the need for a more “stable electrical supply system,” pointing out the inherent instability in wind and solar electricity generating sources.

The energy crisis in Europe is collapsing as countries like the Netherlands, Czech Republic, and Greece are all beginning to realize that everything that needs electricity is made with fossil fuels and they’re reverting. They’re also recognizing that all the components of wind turbines and solar panels are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

In addition, Sweden’s new government has abolished state subsidies for electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

Another reality is that  all the mineral products and metals  needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. Decommissioning and restoration of those mining landscapes back to their original pristine condition is not in the cards in developing countries.

Since Germany shut down its last three remaining nuclear power plants, the country has had to turn to its neighbors to keep the lights on. Germany has gone from being an exporter of electricity to an importer.

For profitability and sustainability, private industry business decisions are based on return-on-investments (ROI) which directly relates to affordable, reliable, continuous, and uninterruptable electricity to support their investments. Thus, Germany should look at Sweden who has just abandoned the idealistic goal of occasional electricity from wind and solar and committed to nuclear for electricity that is not only continuous and uninterruptible but emission free.

It is crucial that we address this issue and find sustainable solutions for decommissioning and recycling of these wind turbines. As a society, we must prioritize responsible and safe disposal of renewable electricity infrastructure to truly achieve a sustainable future.

Shockingly, the recycling of worn-out turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries, in the few wealthy and less populated countries that are subsidizing intermittent electricity is not yet in the cards!
The Heartland Institute

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Until recently, wind turbine blades were nearly impossible to recycle. Now, one company is shredding the blades so they can be used as fuel in cement making. But is this the best way to deal with a growing waste problem?

More than 90% of used solar panels get thrown in the trash, and the world’s wind industry is estimated to produce 43 million tons of blade waste each year. But some companies have found recycling solutions. Ben Tracy reports.

‘Toxic batteries’ of electric vehicles to become ‘environmental disaster’: Bernardi

“These toxic batteries, chemicals and solar panels, and wind panels; they are the environmental disaster of two decades time,” Mr. Bernardi told Sky News host Caleb Bond.

Sky News Australia

Sky News host Cory Bernardi says there needs to be more talk around the “disposal costs and dangers” of electric car components, as a recent report found electric cars are worse for the environment than petrol ones.

“These toxic batteries, chemicals and solar panels, and wind panels; they are the environmental disaster of two decades time,” Mr. Bernardi told Sky News host Caleb Bond.