Snopes dealt with the question of whether windmill blades were buried in a landfill in Casper, Wyoming. Snopes said, “It is true that there is a landfill in Casper, Wyoming, that does accept decommissioned and damaged wind turbine blades and motors, both of which are not recyclable. However, it is important to highlight that up to 90% of a wind turbine is recyclable. That one-tenth of a windmill is not recyclable does not necessarily negate its overall green energy production over the course of its 20- to 25-year lifetime.”
Snopes has a way of twisting reality.
The blades have to be buried at the end of their lifespan. There is no alternative.
Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled and are piling up in landfills. There are only a few landfills in the country that accept decommissioned blades.
According to Bloomberg, companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.
A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan, they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.
The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to an end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones, says Bloomberg writer Chris Martin.
Currently, there are no plans to dispose of the plates in an environmentally friendly way.
The current process for getting rid of these blades is to pile them up and cover them with dirt like a mass grave.
Tossing these massive 120-foot pieces of fiberglass is incredibly wasteful and antithetical to the green aspect of this energy source.
The Casper regional landfill will accept 1000 of these blades, and then they’ll shut it down.
Each turbine blade needs between 30 and 44.8 ft. of landfill space. They run out of space fairly quickly. And there are no plans to deal with the problem of disposal.
You have to bury them and will soon run out of blade burial grounds.
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