Environment Plymouth

You can’t recycle wind turbines. If you’ve ever said this, or believed someone that’s said it, look away now. Do not continue reading if you know it’s going to trigger you. It is one of the favourite arguments against renewable energy, and it has just taken a hit. Scotland’s first commercial wind farm has been decommissioned after operating since 1995. So what happened to all that supposedly “unrecyclable” green technology? 79.5% of it was recycled. 20.4% was reused and repurposed for future spare parts. Less than 0.1% went to landfill. That’s 99.9% recycled or reused. “But the blades! What about the blades?!” Those were processed into a new polymer material that can be used as an alternative to timber, concrete and virgin plastics in construction. It gets worse for the weird anti-renewables crowd… The original wind farm needed 26 turbines. The replacement? Just 14 modern turbines, producing around FIVE TIMES the generating capacity of the original site. Enough electricity equivalent to the annual needs of around 57,000 homes. Of course, this doesn’t mean wind turbines have zero environmental impact. Nothing does. But the next time somebody tells you we’ll have millions of wind turbine blades dumped in landfill while insisting we should continue extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels forever… Send them this post.