Hawkeye Reporter

When Julie Kuntz sees wind turbine blades pile up in a landfill, her blood boils because she feels the wind industry has misled Iowans.

"Be careful of what the wind industry tells you," said Kuntz, an industrial wind opponent. "They're going to tell you that they're working on recycling them, they are getting close to it and that there's a plant in Des Moines but that is not so. There's a sign on a fence and that's about it."

Kuntz, a married mother of two children, co-founded the Facebook group Concerned Residents of Worth and Winnebago Counties nearly four years ago. Last year, she received a complaint from one of the group’s 440 members about gigantic wind blades inside the Winnebago County landfill near Lake Mills.

"They profess to be such a clean energy industry but I don't know what's in all these epoxy resins," Kuntz told the Hawkeye Reporter. "It's certainly a lot of industrial waste that is not going to be biodegrading anytime soon. We're talking huge, huge amounts."

Kuntz's Facebook group isn’t the only organization that has a problem with the way wind turbine blades are retired.

Wind turbine blade disposal is also a dilemma for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) because its mission is to see less waste going to landfills, according to Theresa Stiner, environmental specialist senior with the DNR.

“We want to promote recycling but at the same time we don't want to have places where they stockpile a lot then recycling doesn't ever quite pan out,” Stiner said in an interview. “We don't want to have situations like that. We have that with various materials like tires and computers where people may have the best of intentions to recycle them but don’t and that creates a mess for us to clean up. We don't want to see that happen.”

Currently, used blades and panels are stored at properties leased by Global Fiberglass Solutions for eventual recycling. However, Stiner told the Hawkeye Reporter that the DNR has also received complaints from residents wondering how long blades and panels will be stockpiled.

“We don’t get directly involved other than overseeing that they're doing it correctly, which is mostly driven by complaints about places where people are seeing blades stored,” Stiner said. “We haven't had many complaints but people see them out there and let us know about it. It's not legal to pile trash out. It becomes an issue of illegal disposal."

The number of used solar panels could total 80 million metric tons in only 30 years, according to media reports, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg since wind turbine blades are not included in the count.

“The blades are obviously very large, bulky and they don't recycle well,” said Stiner. “The landfills don’t like them so much because they're very difficult for them to handle and to actually cut them up into smaller pieces. There's a lot of challenges there.”

But Casper, Wyoming Solid Waste Manager Cynthia Langston claims there are no challenges on the landfill end in Wyoming.

About a year ago, the Casper Regional Landfill began burying used wind turbine blades from two wind farms, according to media reports. 

More than 900 blades, to be exact.

“Wind turbine energy, as I understand it from owners of turbine farms, are an invaluable renewable energy source,” Langston told the Hawkeye Reporter. “Disposal of the 10% or less components in a wind turbine system that are not recyclable, such as blades and motor casing, are the most inert material the Casper Regional Landfill receives and is a great source of revenue. We GPS track buried waste so it could be farmed in the future.”

Wind turbine blades are mainly composed of composite materials combining high tensile strength fibers with polymer resins to form glass or carbon fiber reinforced polymers (GFRP or CFRP), according to Aubryn Cooperman, engineering analyst with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

The combination makes recycling a hope for a distant future. Currently, blades are not typically recycled in the U.S., according to NREL research analyst Eric Lantz.

“Composite materials are used for wind turbine blades because they are strong, lightweight and durable but their strength and durability present challenges for disposal,” Cooperman told the Hawkeye Reporter.

NREL data shows that some 80 to 90% of the blade mass is a composite material of which 60-70% is reinforcing fibers. The other 30 to 40% is resin.

“Blades also include balsa wood or foam cores, fasteners, adhesives, and paint and other coatings,” said Cooperman in an interview. “Separating these elements into homogeneous input streams for new uses is a key challenge for recycling blades, with composite materials presenting the most difficulty. Some recycling processes do not attempt to separate composite materials, while processes that do separate composites may be unable to reproduce the structural characteristics of virgin materials.”

The cost of disposing wind turbines in landfills, experts say, is factored into the overall cost of producing electricity and service to customers.

For example, PacifiCorp’s electric customers include Rocky Mountain Power in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho while Pacific Power serves Oregon, Washington and Northern California. Both PacifiCorp and Pacific Power are Berkshire Hathaway energy subsidiaries. Berkshire Hathaway is owned by Warren Buffet.

“For a utility company, we have a number of different sources of electrical generation and all of those have decommissioning costs when the resource has to be either upgraded or retired and those costs do go into the price of electricity but I don't think the effect of landfill costs on disposing of blades is subtracted directly from the output costs that really goes into the overall cost of producing electricity and that is factored in when the company goes through a rate review with its state utility commissions,” said David Eskelsen, senior communications consultant with PacifiCorp.