Blade Circularity - Vestas Blade Recycling - video Dailymotion

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00:00So Vestas has been around for a long time, but they've been in the turbine game since just about

00:081979, and they've been exclusively making wind turbines since 1989. End of life is basically

00:13when a turbine reaches the end of its functional lifespan, and that's about 25 to 30 years. So

00:19when it's decommissioned, it can either go into landfill or it can be recycled. And that's where

00:23Vestas has stepped into the space and begun working on this recycling methodology to help

00:28us keep our blades out of landfill. We'll deploy a crew to site, and once the blade

00:36is on the ground, we'll actually make some cuts in that blade so that we can pack it onto

00:39a trailer. And we do that so we don't have to get the special wind turbine blade transport

00:44trailers right there. They're very expensive and they're very disruptive to traffic.

00:48So we're packing all those blades onto a trailer as best as we can, and we ship them to our

00:56central processing facility, which is currently in Iowa.

01:04We cut it down even further, and then we're actually grinding them down to smaller than

01:08two cubic inches. And that material is then delivered to our processing partners in the

01:13cement industry.

01:19And through the process of cement co-processing, they're recovering the energy that's bound up

01:22inside the turbine blades and mixing the ash in with the clinker for the production of Portland

01:26cement. We wanted to ensure that we had an industry-wide solution. So as our recycling

01:31capabilities continue to improve, we're seeing more and more landfills that used to take this

01:35material begin to reject it and now request that material be sent to us instead. Currently

01:40everything we're doing is all domestic. It's all domestically developed, it's all domestically

01:44processed, it's all in the US. We also have an ongoing initiative over in Denmark called the

01:50Sea Tech project, in which they've developed a recovery method in which you can take not

01:54only the resin out of the fiberglass, but you can separate the resin into its component parts.

01:59And the goal would be to bring that to the US and be able to produce new turbine blades

02:02with the material.

02:04You know, the future is really bright for Vestas and blade recycling. Our first year in the

02:07program, we recycled 1,600 tons worth of turbine blade material. And then in our second year

02:12of the program, we recycled 5,600 tons worth of turbine blade material. And then in the next

02:16five to 10 years, the market takes off pretty exponentially. And our capabilities are projected

02:21to follow. Not only is there a growing market here in the US for blade recycling, but there's

02:25a growing market globally for recycling. And there's a lot of local communities and landfills

02:29as well that would like to see the material handled in a more responsible way.