Startup aims to give turbine blades a second wind

Startup aims to give turbine blades a second wind

The Re-Wind Network aims to recycle them into urban furniture and amenities.

With this new venture, turbine blades are given a second life instead of winding up in a landfill. (Rawpixel pic)
PARIS:
Wind turbine blades have a lifespan of about 20 years. After that, they are dismantled and most of the time buried in landfill.

The Re-Wind Network project intends to recycle them to create urban furniture, with the first such projects launched in Denmark and Ireland.

To do this, the group has assembled a research team of experts from City College of New York and the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, and University College Cork and Queen’s University Belfast in Ireland.

Together, they are looking for alternative ways to intelligently recycle turbine blades. Indeed, the steel and polycarbonate elements of these blades could very well be recycled, sometimes in surprising ways.

The very first construction was made in Aalborg, Denmark, in the form of a dramatically designed bicycle park. In the long run, the Danish government hopes to encourage this initiative in order to limit the amount of waste produced by wind turbines.

Today, Re-Wind has come up with nearly 50 different concepts for reusing these blades, from bike parks and bus shelters to footbridges and noise barriers. In Ireland alone, many wind farms will have to be renewed by 2025, which will require the recycling of many blades.

Re-Wind is now working on several projects to make use of these gigantic metallic structures. The team is even studying the possibility of using them to make a skatepark, proving that wind turbine blades can effectively have a second life rather than being consigned to landfill.

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