It looks nice and I can appreciate the story, but saying « discarded » makes it sound like it has no value, but Scrap structural steel definitely does.
> designed the Wikado Playground to address the issue of saving out-of-service wind turbines from landfill.
Wind turbine blades, such as those used on this playground, are typically not recycled and have little scrap value. Their structure is primarily of fiberglass, some with carbon fiber, often with foam and balsa wood as well. There is some metal, typically in the lightning protection system (copper and aluminum) and blade root (blade studs, covers, possibly a steel blade root insert), but they do not comprise the majority of the structure. On decommissioning it is relatively common for blades to be shredded and landfilled.
I've just read some book proposing to make the blades out of natural fiber materials such as bamboo. There seems to be quite a lot of research going on.
Edit: The article does indeed appear to talk about composite materials.
> According to research, there will be, at current growth rates, 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually worldwide
> > According to research, there will be, at current growth rates, 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually worldwide
My heart hurts when I re-read this as "225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material landfilled anually worldwide N years from now", N being the average lifetime of a wind turbine.
Humanity currently dumps about 2 billion tonnes of waste every year[1]. That's ten thousand times as much as this (projected) figure. And we are currently producing about 400 million tonnes of plastic per year[2], which is itself about two thousand times as much.
There is no particular reason to expect all of decommissioned wind turbine waste to get shredded into landfill. The core of modern blades is mainly balsawood[3], metal parts should be recyclable, fiberglass is inert and probably recyclable. The small fraction of epoxy and coatings should certainly be processed responsibly.
The fuel rods themselves are only a part of the total waste. After about 50 years you also have to effectively landfill the entire reactor - securely away from the water table. And meanwhile there's a constant stream of process chemicals and disposable protective gear.
It looks like current "high level waste" (fuel rods) production is about 30,000 tonnes a year.
For the problem of global warming itself, given positive EROI, it's better to have those turbines and emit that less carbon. But for the problem of not running out of resources, it may be worse.
In a way, under existing economic regime you can pretty much consider renewables as non-renewable energy sources. A wind turbine doesn't burn non-renewable fuel, but it does "burn" non-renewable construction materials. Of course, climate change is the more pressing problem now, but I'm not 100% sure how much more pressing, given the exponents involved in all of this.
Most of all, just thinking about how even renewable energy is entirely embedded in our process of transforming raw resources into waste (with a little bit of economic value extracted in the middle) just breaks my heart.
Most of all, just thinking about how even renewable energy is entirely embedded in our process of transforming raw resources into waste (with a little bit of economic value extracted in the middle)...
This is really just the second law of thermodynamics making its presence felt (not to imply that we're anywhere near close to some kind of entropic limit in the construction of wind turbines, but as a rule of thumb: in the process of doing useful work, things degrade).
From what I've heard about work for the next IPCC report, the issue is much more pressing than thought before.
I'm not sure how far they are through quality control etc, but when a bunch of different group gets to similar results independently, you can probably assume no huge errors.
I'd say definitely better. You can probably throw them into the garbage power plants, and if not it's still a much more manageable problem. More tangible too, which is one of the big tragedies of carbon emissions.
The article mentions "composite material". From the pictures it is hard to say whether it is fiberglass/polyester, carbon fiber/epoxy or what; but either way these materials are much harder to recycle than steel.
Most metals are relatively easily recycled. Therefore scrap metal has value as feedstock for production of new equipment. A modern wind turbine tower might have 150 metric tons of steel in it, which absolutely makes sense to recycle.
> designed the Wikado Playground to address the issue of saving out-of-service wind turbines from landfill.
Nononono.