Or we could pull our heads out of our collective arses and find uses for structural fiberglass. I’m sure blocks cut out of the stuff being water proof insulating and strong could be used.
Good thing we don't have to worry about 'coal ash' and left over materials from a decommissioned, fossil or nuclear power plant. They just magically evaporate, right? As soon as someone says there is a "recycle" problem, I want to know where the landfills full of Prius batteries are located as I have a shovel. They are just jerks trying to pull our chain with the assumption we are fuzzy thinking, "greens." I wonder where they got that idea: Bob Wilson
Yeah this isn't a recycling problem. This is either a manufacturing or transportation issue. If it were easier to make (and unmake) the blades at the wind farm location, the problem would go away. If it were easier/cheaper to ship obnoxiously large objects cross-country, this problem would go away. I don't see much action happening on the latter. But maybe it will be easier to build giant blades out of smaller components such that it can be built up from things that fit on pallets.
The size also means high cost in transporting. It is the inverse of the styrofoam problem; too light and low value to justify the transport cost. So they end up in the closes landfill.
If I were to guess, it's the same challenge as extracting gold from sea-water. Return on investment. It can cost so much, that it outweighs the value we put on the element . Or heck - for that matter, the cost to extract hydrogen out of other elements so we can claim the fuel cell car is no less or more costly then running a gasoline car. Extracting hydrogen might be an equally similar challenge to recycling Giant turbine blades .... because neither of the two yield profits ... but we do it, anyway. There are lots of things that we have to clean up - although there's often little or no money in it. Sometimes we do clean(er) - just so we're not existing in our own filth or a toxic wasteland. .
Styrofoam can be recycled, but without a special compactor, it costs more in fuel than it is worth to ship from collection to recycling centers. Recyclable fiber glass resin is being developed. Apply the 'deactivator', and the resin returns to goo. Depending on the nature of the chemicals, getting the blades down to a more manageable size on site might be possible.
Recyclable turbine blades have been developed: Moving wind turbine blades toward recyclability -- ScienceDaily
Or you could just chop the existing 80% strength blades into 10’-30’ sections and use them as highway walls and pillons heck if the town wouldn’t fine me $10000 a day I would build a house out of them with reused custom cut glass sections just to proof of concept “fortress of solitude “ pillon home in piano white A wavy sealed floor made of vertically segmented / horizontally cut & matched blade sections would be quite visually interesting while having a good r value If I did it, I bet it would become just as cliched as all of the Russian Goolag styled construction made to look like randomly colored containers going up everywhere. would take minimal energy and materials to chop into reasonable segments even at 80% strength the stuff is strong as steel , flexible, waterproof, doesn’t rot, r50 per foot insulated value, it’s even fairly fire resistant.
