What nasty problem do nuclear, coal, and wind power share? It’s waste disposal. In the well-known case of nuclear power, the problem is what to do with long-lived, highly radioactive spent fuel. It’s a problem the industry and the U.S. government have been failing to solve for more than 70 years. For coal, its waste ponds that have accumulated for decades, polluting streams and groundwater, and sometimes even causing widespread destruction when dams fail.
For wind, the waste problem is disposing wind turbine blades when the windmill’s life is done. As the first generation of widespread wind farms ends, the problem is just beginning to get recognition. It figures to become more pressing as wind power grows in response to concerns about global warming.
A 2017 article in the journal Waste Management observed, “With the first wave of early commercial wind turbine installations now approaching their end of life, the problem of blade disposal is just beginning to emerge as a significant factor for the future.” The article estimated that “there will be 43 million tonnes of blade waste worldwide by 2050 with China possessing 40% of the waste, Europe 25%, the United States 16% and the rest of the world 19%.”
According to the American Clean Power Association, the Washington lobbying group that includes the wind industry, “Roughly 80 to 94% of a wind turbine (by mass) is made up of readily recyclable materials, including steel, copper, aluminum, and iron. This estimate also includes the steel used in the turbine’s concrete foundation. Wind turbine blades make up less than 8% of the total wind turbine’s mass…”
But the most visible component of a modern power-generating windmill is that array of three spinning blades, sometimes as long as a football field. When their useful life ends, the blades can’t be recycled, although the industry is attempting to find ways to overcome that hurdle. The wind lobby writes, “Blades need to be both durable and flexible to withstand sometimes harsh environmental conditions for twenty-plus years while generating electricity efficiently. Modern wind turbine blades are built with a ‘sandwich’ panel design, where fiberglass or carbon-fiber ‘skins’ overlay both sides of balsa wood or plastic foam core. This structure is typically infused with a liquid thermoset resin system that becomes rigid when heated. Once manufactured, separating these materials is difficult and complex; thus, making blade recycling challenging.”
Today, the only economical way to dispose of used wind turbine blades is in landfills, which can raise environmentalist hackles, although the used blades are inert, and can provide a good backfill, reducing the amount of soil cover required to bury the waste. Anti-wind campaigners have been objecting to landfilling the turbine blades as “toxic,” without evidence for that claim (and also raising essentially the same complaint about solar photovoltaic panels).
Wyoming, a wind power mecca, is already facing the issue of what to do with the old blades. The Casper Regional Landfill has already taken some 1,000 blades for disposal, and expects others. The state has lots of uninhabited land with plentiful winds, and access to electric transmission as a result of powerlines supporting over 6,700 MW of coal-fired generation in 12 stations, several of them coal mine mouth operations.
Wyoming is the nation’s largest coal producer, with most of the coal coming from strip mines on federal lands in the Powder River Basin. Under the 1977 federal Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act (another environmental feather in former President Jimmy Carter’s cap), those mines must restore the land they have mined to the “approximate original contour,” essentially landfilling them. Mining companies would like to use the spent blades as backfill, making restoration easier and less costly.
The Wyoming state government supports using decommissioned wind turbine blades as backfill at the strip mines. But that requires federal approval, as the mines are taking federal coal. As Cowboy State Daily reported, the state legislature in 2020 approved legislation changing the state’s regulations to allow turbine blades as backfill in approved mine reclamation plans. Gov. Mark Gordon signed the law and the state’s “Department of Environmental Quality quickly developed a rule package, which the Wyoming Environmental Quality Council approved.”
The rule package went to the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement in August 2021. Wyoming is still waiting for Interior action. “The idea was that, since we have the rail lines going to the mines, we could accept this waste from the wind industry and use it for some backfill to help lower reclamation costs,” Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told the statewide news service. “It was the most eloquent solution to solving the massive waste problem that wind towers generate, but the Biden administration and the Office of Surface Mining has just sat on it.”
Making the turbine blades recyclable is under study, but the efforts are far from offering solutions. A 2020 paper by the Union of Concerned Scientists notes, “In the end, the goal of increasing innovation towards additional use applications for retired turbine blades requires having enough market demand to incentivize the creation of facilities that can recycle the blades. Alongside that challenge is a lack of policy in the U.S. regarding end-of-use considerations for turbine blades, further contributing to the status quo of storage or disposal as solid waste in landfills.”
–Kennedy Maize
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