A MOBILE SOLUTION TO RECYCLE DEGRADED WIND TURBINE BLADES

Wind power production is a growing green industry, and end-of-life wind turbine blades are a sizable recycling problem. There are already over 70,000 wind turbines in the U.S. alone.

Recycling wind turbine blades is a big deal – wind energy represents a large source of clean power, but there’s a side of wind energy that isn’t often thought of: How are those giant wind turbine blades destroyed at end of life?

Wind turbine blades must be rebuilt often – sometimes as frequently as every 10 to 12 years. The blades break down from flexing to erosion, UV damage, lightning strikes, and recalls due to delamination and cracking. Manufacturers construct the blades using various materials, including fibreglass, carbon fibre, balsa wood, foam, and resin.

The variety of manufacturing materials makes them difficult to repair or reuse. Instead, energy companies leave old wind turbine blades on the ground next to their old towers or send them to landfills, counteracting a large part of this clean energy.

There are some solutions in development to address this growing concern, such as recycling these massive waste products, but the recycling of wind turbines is still a new concept.

“We’re in the infancy of wind turbine blade recycling,” says Lee Sage, industrial sales specialist at SSI Shredding Systems. “The problem is that the U.S. dove into wind energy never considering the end of life of those components and where they would go. It was always going to be someone else’s problem.”

Enter Sean Baisden, the owner of Pitbull Blade Demolition, who was tasked to destroy the thousands of wind turbine blades that are decommissioned each year. To keep his costs down, Baisden needed a machine that was capable of shredding the blades while remaining small enough to move from wind farm to wind farm. He reached out to SSI Shredding Systems who went on to design a solution to this growing waste problem. Due to their components and enormous profile, wind turbine blades are extremely difficult to shred. The Dual-Shear M120 two-shaft shredder has the torque and technology to break down and recycle wind turbine blades, and is often used for bulky item reduction such as tires, appliances, aluminum, and electronic scrap.

“There are a lot of different aspects that go into working or developing a new application, like a wind turbine blade. This has been three years in the works,” says Sage.

Creating a mobile shredder can be challenging since it must be within the weight and height constraints set by the Department of Transportation. Nevertheless, moving the shredder to various turbine disposal sites has been invaluable to Pitbull Blade Demolition.

The shredder itself is mounted on a 53-foot flatbed trailer and hauled with a diesel-powered vehicle. The shredder rotates at a low speed, uses high-torque hydraulics, and runs on a Caterpillar motor. Pre-cut turbine blades are fed into a hopper on top which then pulverizes them into smaller pieces. The waste is then moved up a conveyer belt built with a skid-mount design that empties the shreds into a truck or dumpster.

“An average blade takes about two to three hours to shred and it’s shredded down into sub-four-inch pieces,” says Baisden. “We then supply these shreds to REGEN Fiber, a new company in Iowa that recycles them for reuse as raw materials in various industries. So, none of the material whatsoever goes to the landfill from the wind turbine [blade].”

REGEN Fiber recently started converting shredded turbine blades into reinforcement fibre materials that add strength and durability to concrete and mortar applications such as pavement, slabs-on-grade, and precast products.