Wasting Away in Wind-and-Solarville
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Already, horror stories exist of municipalities faced with decommissioning problems. Towns like Sweetwater, Texas, which for many years has been the leading state for wind power, have seen turbine recycling contracts ignored. Global Fiberglass Solutions, one of the companies handling such contracts, did not return requests for comment.“You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already,” Isaac said. “It’s an environmental disaster we’re looking at.”
While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.
The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals – not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines – pose no threat current to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.
Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.
“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”
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