Race to recycle wind turbines in Denmark - BBC News 

I love Denmark. They do big things in a little country.

I really like the idea of 3D printing houses with recycled materials. The implications are good.

Glad to know it is going to be simple chemistry of acetic acid. Acetates of so many things are very soluble in water, and acetic acid can easily be made from plants. The scaling up of recyling will therefore be commercial problems rather than technical or environmental problems. As Demark is the pioneering tiny country to adopt wind turbines on a large scale, they have a head start and an urgent need in developing ways to recycle turbines.

So, if they are virtually indestructible why are they replaced?

Gotta love the Danes!

Step 1: Demand a certain degree of recyclability before placing the wind turbines. Step 2: create the financial structures to encourage the actual recycling Products which aren't designed to be recycled will seldom be cost-effectively recycled. only downcycled. Things aren't hard, but there is simply no long-term vision.

This problem is fairly small compared to other kinds of waste in our society. But obviously it would be great to recycle wind turbines.

At 5:07 "Now we've found a chemical process that can chew its way right through the epoxy". Okay, I'm not much of a chemist, but if you have a chemical that 'chews its way through the epoxy', that's going to create an awfully potent by-product. How potent IS it, and how do they dispose of it? Are they creating a new problem in the course of solving an older one?

I found this video presentation very interesting and entertaining. Thanks to all involved. Cheers Colin Cairns 🇦🇺

We have some half solutions to use these retired blades in cement production or Repurpose them in bridge construction, furnitures, electric transmission poles, and playground equipment but the amount of these retired blades in future will be much more and we can't just accommodate them in just Repurposing solutions that's why we need complete recycling solutions and i am happy that Vestas and Siemens Gamesa are making great progress to make this reality.

this is very informative 🙂

Trully amazing

Fantastic

I've read that Vestas had put fourth a recycling process earlier this year ? given this report was also filmed in Aarhus i'm assuming it's this one

What happens with turbines after lifespan? With blades? Just replace generator and work further?

Just out of interest does anyone know what happens to the acidic solution after the blade has been in there? Thanks

Lithium mining is insanely polluting.

Recycle them into gummy bears. What a wonderful future our overlords have planned for us.

Catamaran hulls?

Joooo I live near there?!

3:14 the guy just touched fiberglass with his raw hands😵

Other countries would love to have the old ones

countries already recycling wind turbines when mine hasn't even built it's first one💀

That's fine

No one complains about oil refineries, or diamond mines. How’s the cleanup for those locations. What BS

I am wondering about the By products that they are using to Dissolve the wings with , by the way take 5 mins and go through the posts to report the Amazon ( random annoying number ) posts as spam , we may get to see less of them ,

Love You All Sir Ji and All Mam❤️❤️❤️. Keep It up All Sir Ji and All Mam❤️❤️❤️

I could live in one of those blades or several . . I could build a yacht. And use parts of other blades as sails .

IT: Benny Hill considered funnier than Monty Python by two TV stations--WOR and WLVI!

What about the bisphenal A forever chemical used in the blades? A known endocrine disrupter. The issue of particulate 'microplastic' matter coming from the blades themselves as they degrade and subsequent release of bisphenol A into oceans and grassland. The bigger the blades the more microplastics etc This is all surface and reeks a little of 'greenwashing' the issue.

Don’t mention that Truck,Car and big machines tyres is a major problem for the environment and many of those go into Land fill or dumps.

I think when people are solving the same problems, using “race” to solve is a separation and not to unite, if the people can unite together to solve problems the problems can be solved faster.

bbc, make new windmills out of them

Nice news segment about Norwegian wind power.... what happened to British news? How many of these videos are about the UK? I see more news about the UK on DW, France 24, and TVP than here on the BBC channel...

*Summary* - 0:02 The test center in Northern Denmark is testing the largest and most powerful turbines, with the biggest one being 280m high. - 0:05 These turbines are- Turbine machines are getting more powerful, with the largest reaching 280 meters high and breaking world records for power output. - 0:34 They're expected to get larger, with the design turbine being 450m from ground to highest tip. - 0:46 By 2030, wind power could supply a fifth of the world's- There are plans to create a new test center in Denmark for a design turbine that could reach 450 meters high. - 0:50 By 2030, wind power could supply a fifth of the world's electricity. - 0:54 The green industry has a waste problem, as turbines are hard to recycle when they reach their end of life. - 1:07 While the steel in the towers can be reused, fifth of the world's electricity. - 1:12 Turbines are built to withstand forces of nature, making them flexible, light, and super strong. - 1:19 However, when turbines reach, the massive blades are almost indestructible and often end up in landfill. - 1:31 By 2050, there could be 43 million tons of redundant blades globally that need to be dealt with. - 2:00 Some creative solutions for reusing wind turbine blades include using them for bike sheds, playgrounds, the end of their life, they are difficult to recycle. While the steel and towers can be reused, the massive blades are almost indestructible. - 2:18 One immediate solution is to chop up and shred the blades, then burn them as fuel and use them as an ingredient for cement production. - 1:26 Many old turbines get dumped in landfills and by 2050, there could be 43 million tons of redundant blades globally that need to be dealt with. - 2:39 Solutions- Turbine maker [Siemens Gamesa] has had a breakthrough, manufacturing blades that can be recycled using a resin called epoxy. - 3:21 The blades need to be soaked in a big bath of mild acetic acid, allowing the different glass layers to separate from the blade. - 3:50 The materials from these recycled blades could to recycling turbine blades have been explored, including repurposing them for other uses like bike sheds, playgrounds, bridges, and building cladding. - 4:03 be used to make other things such as furniture, suitcases, and surfboards. - 4:19 Researchers at [Aarhus] University have discovered a chemical process that gently- An immediate solution is chopping and shredding them to be burned as fuel or used as an ingredient for cement production. - 4:22 Siemens Gamesa has developed breaks apart the components of the turbine blades, potentially allowing the fibers and epoxy resin to be recovered and reused. - 5:28 These recycling solutions have potential applications in other industries such as aeronautics, space, and cars. Disclaimer: I used the video transcript and GPT4 (and a lot of copy and paste) to make this summary. Manual edits are in brackets [].

Could cut the blades shorter and use re-use them on smaller turbines? 😮🇬🇧🌈👍♥️

Haven’t they shown in Business Insider where they “recycle” turbines to make cement?

Why are so many videos polluted with irrelevant music..?

A bit of non news really. Even with Gen 1 blades the total weight of blades required to generate 2GW ( about the same as a large coal plant ) would be around 14,000 tonnes. Whereas a 2GW coal plant would burn 14,000 tonnes of coal - PER DAY !!!

🇩🇰❤

How much energy is consumed to make these monstrosities? Really is ridiculous

Hi Neil’s, Nuclear Power has become so much safer, so please check it. All energy sources have negative effects. But they differ enormously in size: as we will see, fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner. From the perspective of both human health and climate change, it matters less whether we transition to nuclear power or renewable energy and more that we stop relying on fossil fuels.

Fun fact due larg mass they need another power supply to get the blads to overcome the initial load IE Inertia before the wind arrive Bit of a joke Clean and green. I don't think so Alternative and intermittent yes

So much chemicals used to produce and breakdown fiberglass,, is the wind turbine really worth saving our enviroment?? bit like the electric car problem with metal batteries. ????

People just don’t want to see these monstrosities scattered everywhere, same with solar. Go with Thermal/Hydro and Nuclear, power you can depend on!

the lesson of evolutionary history is that species who adapt to change are more likely to survive them

how is 50 tons of ore for one battery that has a 7 year shelf life, that needs fossil fuels plus rare metals to be built, charged and maintained better for the environment?

Great wind power and wind turbine. India must install more wind turbines. ❤

if they are virtually indestructible then why replace them at all or just repair them

I found this video a typical rah-rah piece with a lot of flashy editing and devoid of technical information. I want to learn the actual chemistry and thermodynamics facts about the cement kiln recycling. (2:20). What actually burns? Glass is primarily sand. Sand does not burn. Thermal decomposition is just going to burn off the resins and result in sand. What is the heat content of the resin? If FRP trash is added to a cement kiln isn't the result cement with sand already in it? That will increase shipping cost for the cement producer as their cement has a higher proportion of sand so the end user is paying for less cement in each tonne, ton, kg or pound of cement/sand mixture? In effect we're all to be charged for the recycling of wind turbine blades for every project that includes mortar or concete? Bike sheds, playground equipment and surfboards? The "green" crowd are dementedly lame grasping at every straw to justify their existence. And an equally lame producer, director and editor of a hopelessly woke media giant unquestioningly believes that bit of lameness important enough to be included. Sad. Just plain sad.

80 degrees Celsius? So they're going to need kettles the size of warehouses (you know the most energy hungry appliance in your house) and they will be powered by what? It won't be air turbines that's for sure.. to achieve what? material for furniture and surfboards?! They're having a laugh, better off using them as man made reefs like they do with tires and old ships, drill holes in them and place heavy rocks or tires inside unless this stuff is harmful to sea life of course, then just use them to make foundations for roads in a desert or something similar..

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💵💵💵💵not even with 🌿 hilarious

Why they don't just make the blades from aluminum like they used to do with aircraft wings? Much easier to recycle aluminum parts.

Start saving the earth before its to late..

@BenShapiro

Are they Green really? Well the amount of concrete in the foundations is massive . Now remember this is the very reason dams are not green power yet in all the countries now running wind they have used more concrete than all the dams in the world. Sound untrue? A dam lasts 100yrs plus makes more power and can be almost fully recycled Wind cant come close to that as their looking at 20-25yrs

all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy. For a snapshot of what all this points to regarding the total materials footprint of the green energy path, consider the supply chain for an electric car battery. A single battery providing a useful driving range weighs about 1,000 pounds. Providing the refined minerals needed to fabricate a single EV battery requires the mining, moving, and processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet . That’s 20 times more than the 25,000 pounds of petroleum that an internal combustion engine uses over the life of a car. Among the material realities of green energy: Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society. A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones. Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans-never mind aspirations for far greater expansion-will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile. Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil. By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels-much of it nonrecyclable-will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage. The extraction process of lithium is very resource demanding and specifically uses a lot of water in the extraction process. It is estimated that 500,000 gallons of water is used to mine one metric ton of lithium. With the world's leading country in production of lithium being Chile, the lithium mines are in rural areas with an extremely diverse ecosystem. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, one of the driest places on earth, about 65% of the water is used to mine lithium; leaving many of the local farmers and members of the community to find water elsewhere. Along with physical implications on the environment, working conditions can violate the standards of sustainable development goals. Additionally, it is common for locals to be in conflict with the surrounding lithium mines. There have been many accounts of dead animals and ruined farms in the surrounding areas of many of these mines. In Tagong, a small town in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture China, there are records of dead fish and large animals floating down some of the rivers near the Tibetan mines. After further investigation, researchers found that this may have been caused by leakage of evaporation pools that sit for months and sometimes even years. Lithium-ion batteries contain metals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese, which are toxic and can contaminate water supplies and ecosystems if they leach out of landfills. Additionally, fires in landfills or battery-recycling facilities have been attributed to inappropriate disposal of lithium-ion batteries. As a result, some jurisdictions require lithium-ion batteries to be recycled. In spite of the environmental cost of improper disposal of lithium-ion batteries, the rate of recycling is still relatively low, as recycling processes remain costly and immature. More than 400 million batteries are used throughout the country, with only 5% being recycled, resulting in 8000 tonnes ending up in landfill. Creating the lithium-ion battery pack is also more environmentally harmful than the manufacturing process for an average petrol-powered car.

So how long do the wind turbines last? Seems to me if they're "almost indestructible", they should only need to be swapped out what, every 20 yrs?

I think the guy with the saw should wear a mask: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kpQG89oxEVo.html

How much fossil feul is used to create them?

How does the blade waste compare to global CO2 emissions? (4000,000,000 tonnes per year) BBC please highlight both sides of the story as you’re at risk of becoming increasingly biased towards anti-eco!

Millions of birds die under these blade's, maybe the solution is finding a different wind design, a tower of vertical blades , made of recycled plastics or wood

No, its not hard to recycle, they can be used to make cement.

Be very careful, whenever someone claim to have created "unbreakable shield vs unstoppable sword" paradox.

Still better then oil companies.

A total blot on the landscape they can barely power an electric toothbrush

Race aye, i imagine this involves more massive subsidies.

The BBC will report on anything to distract us from what happened in Paris last night 😂

Better for Denmark 🇩🇰 invest in Australia 🇦🇺.

The BBC are so naive.

Here's a green way to turn turbines, nuclear reactors

Just a waste of money.

Race to recycle Tesla's and other electric cars soon.

I’m really looking forward to the plan to recycle the 34 billion tons of CO2 we release from burning fossil fuels each year.

Heard a rumor that Amazon's AMZP33X is going to be integrated into everyday tech. Can anyone confirm?

yeh, next comes solar panel and EV battery recycle.

Everywhere I go, Amazon's AMZP33X is the topic du jour. Is this the dawn of a new tech era?

By 2030 wind power *_could_* supply a fifth of the world’s electricity. That’s comedy gold.

Not really wind 4hours 4days a week full rpm 28,000MWY to the min a full time turbine generator same 3mw 120,000MWY to the min your a hundred thousand mwy???and on neyodium well sorry but both thanks says enough to run its self.

A little too sensationalized for my tastes, they are rather simple solutions touted as incredible discoveries, but yeah I'm glad people are working on recycling. Anything, not just wind turbine blades.

so they are not so green

Hmm only Danmark.? UK.. Israel.. Greece.. Albanian.. Italy Turkey.. Ukraine USA.. and NATO 😂 progress in turbine technician jobs..

Feels like Amazon's AMZP33X is the only thing worth talking about in the tech space right now.

Do a story on what happened in Paris last night BBC..... ❤

CC is a SCAM‼️

(1) what idiot built "sustainable" tech that is NOT recyclable? (2) what idiot designed this kind of tech with such a brief useful lifespan? (3) why can't such workpieces be "permanent" (and not need replacing)? (4) why aren't we using more wind power? After the initial investment, it's basically free energy...

Tomorrow's landfill same as solar about time the world just admits Edison left us a curse

Hydrocarbons for the win in 2023❤

There's an elegance to the way Amazon's AMZP33X is being discussed as a potential cornerstone for the next wave of digital transformation across industries.

So not so green, not so clean, not so renewall, energies.

People who say AMPZ33X are gay

❤

Watching the tech space evolve with Amazon's AMZP33X is like living in a sci-fi novel. Exciting times!

A merry-go-round of ship sails would be far easier to fabricate, maintain and recycle. Not only that, but bird strikes would be non-existent. The only reason to keep pushing windmills is to line already overflowing corporate pockets. They make more money on problems than solutions.

The next step in evolution would be Amazons AMZP33X and dont think this is random, I mean it and you will know why in a matter of days

Windmills in the north sea are a environmental disaster ( sadly)

Let's be honest, Amazon's AMZP33X sounds like it's from a movie. Can someone confirm this is real life?

Honestly, with the way Amazon's AMZP33X is being hyped up, I'm starting to get curious. What's the big deal?

Allahou akbar ❤

Amazon's AMZP33X might just be the secret weapon we didn't know we needed in the tech war.