• usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    Yeah this smacks of “but wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable”! So? It’s still better than what we were doing before.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      20 hours ago

      wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable

      I didn’t even know about that.

      Wonder if they could crush them up and use them as concrete aggregate.

      • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        “made mainly of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and balsa wood” from some random source. Doesn’t sound like anything particularly toxic or difficult to source. I can’t imagine putting them in landfill is a serious problem. So my response is “so what”.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          20 hours ago

          Why not?

          Carbon fiber and fiberglass in concrete foundations would limit microplastics and add strength to the product. Throwing a never-decomposing product into a landfill is just taking up space for something that can decompose over a couple of hundred years. Reuse it at least once it there’s a viable solution.

          • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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            20 hours ago

            Sure. I mean, you could. Probably there are better sources, like construction waste, that you’d want to exhaust first, but I obviously haven’t done a serious cost-benefit analysis, nor am I really qualified. My intuition is that you could do it but there are better uses of the time and money.

            Relatively inert stuff in a landfill doesn’t seem like the highest-priority use of the time and money. The resources used to scrap and recycle a wind turbine blade could probably be much better used for more consequential purposes.

            • TheOakTree@lemmy.zip
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              18 hours ago

              I don’t like the idea of crushed fiberglass in landfills, but it’s far down the list of awful things we do to the planet. I think you’re correct in assuming the effort is better spent elsewhere.