A complaint that you will often hear from renewable energy critics is that the components that make up batteries or wind turbines have a limited life span. Then are good for nothing more than the landfill where they will leach poisons into the soil and groundwater. Although such claims are often hyperbole, the truth is that recycling of many renewable energy components is expensive and energy intensive. That’s why this story of recycling wind turbine blades and the resins that hold their fiberglass together is so exciting.
As this article discusses, fiberglass is one of those hard to recycle products because they are “layered together with resin. This process is used to form bathtubs, roofing panels, or aircraft components Peeling them back apart usually means shredding the end product into tiny pieces and submerging them in tubs of heated solvent under high pressure. Needless to say, the recovered shreds of fibre and glass are not especially useful, or cheap.”
The blades of wind turbines are made from long spans of fiberglass layered with resin and they only have a lifespan of about 30 years. The situation has improved a bit with “the development of recyclable resins, more easily broken down by traditional solvents, and at lower temperatures and pressures. When built of recyclable resins, blades can be resolved into their constituent sheets of fiberglass, intact and reuseable, provided you can find a tub large enough to submerge the entire blade…and a thousand tonnes of solvent to fill it.”
Enter Nick Bigeau, a professional boatbuilder from Nova Scotia, Canada who has come up with a method that doesn’t require submerging the fibreglass into solvent. It’s called ReceTT and is patent-pending and produced under Bigeau’s new venture – Resolve Composites. Originally Bigeau wanted to recycle fiberglass boats into new boats but then he became aware of the turbine blade recycling challenge and the “potential of ReceTT to change the game. Why recycle a boat into a boat, he thought, when they could recycle a blade into a boat?”
“Siemens Gamesa is the second largest wind turbine manufacturer on the planet, and is leading the charge on recyclable resins in the wind industry. Recognizing the potential of ReceTT, in October 2023 they gifted Resolve Composites a 20-foot section of blade, 27 layers of fibreglass deep, held together by recyclable resin. By January 2024, Bigeau and his team had broken the blade into 162 kilograms of reuseable fiberglass sheets.
‘Once I’d separated everything, it took me three hours to roll up all the fibreglass we’d gotten from it,’ he says.”
With this reclaimed fiberglass Bigeau is building “the hull of a Bantam Bay 17 Skiff, a project equal parts demonstration and experimentation — showing off the work of ReceTT while at the same time refining their methods. The plan, says Bigeau, is not to become professional recyclers themselves, but to instead license ReceTT to existing recyclers keen to take on fiberglass.”
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