How green technologies harm the environment: The other side of the coin

Why is it difficult to recycle wind turbine blades

Multi-kilometer burial sites

In 2019, photos from a landfill in the city of Casper, Wyoming, spread across the Internet, showing piles of long wind turbine blades awaiting burial underground. The huge landfill was filled with more than a thousand multi-meter blades, each more than 40 m long  —  that’s half a football field. The images caused widespread criticism of wind energy, which, on the one hand, produces green energy, but on the other, does not provide for environmentally friendly disposal and recycling of huge amounts of waste. Officially, the blades are buried in the ground to be stored there until new recycling methods are invented.

Hundreds of wind turbine blades are covered with earth at a landfill. (Photo: Benjamin Rasmussen / Bloomberg Green)

Wind turbines have a service life of 20–25 years, and the issue of recycling first-generation wind turbines is already extremely acute. There are no questions about what to do with the metal, concrete and power structures of the wind turbine, since they can be recycled. But what to do with the blades is not yet entirely clear. They consist mainly of fiberglass and polymers, which make the material durable, but it is precisely because of them that recycling wind turbines becomes almost impossible.

The blades of decommissioned turbines could occupy hundreds of hectares of land very soon, as the pace of development of wind energy is rapidly increasing. According to the analytical company Ember, in 2024, renewable energy sources and nuclear energy provided 40.9% of global electricity production for the first time. Renewable energy accounted for a record 858 TWh, up 49% from the previous high of 2022. By 2050, the number of wind blades scrapped worldwide is expected to reach around 43 million tonnes. To put this into perspective, that’s the equivalent of nearly 400,000 locomotives.

Ban, recycling, gummy bears

In the summer of 2021, at the annual congress of the Spanish Wind Energy Association, Giles Dixon, CEO of WindEurope (AEE), an association that promotes wind energy in Europe, called on the European Commission to ban the disposal of wind turbine blades at a pan-European level. The ban was supposed to come into force by 2025, but no decision has been made yet.

Meanwhile, the Danish company Vestas has already developed a technology for the complete recycling of wind turbine blades. It allows the reuse of thermosetting composite materials used in their production. Engineers have figured out how to break down epoxy resin into its original components in order to use them to create new blades. Within three years, Vestas will prepare a commercial proposal that will help implement the technology into production. The development will allow the company to achieve zero production waste by 2040.

Scientists from the University of California, Davis, have also addressed the issue of environmentally friendly disposal of wind structures and created compostable blades made of organic matter. They are based on fungal mycelium, organic substrate, and a bamboo frame. The team still has to test the stability of these blades to make sure they can withstand gusts of wind and rotate at a speed of 137 km/h.

Researchers from Michigan State University in the United States have created their own version of a recyclable wind turbine blade. It consists of a composite resin made of fiberglass and a polymer of plant and synthetic origin. When the turbine’s service life is over, the blade can be completely recycled, turning it into a new one, or made into chewing candies. The new form of composite resin is boiled in an alkaline solution to obtain potassium lactate, which, after purification, can be used in the preparation of sweets and sports drinks. So far, the development is only undergoing tests and trials, but it is thanks to such bold experiments that wind energy can become even greener.

Toxic solar panels

About 90% of failed and damaged solar panels end up in landfills because it’s much cheaper than recycling. “We’ve done a phenomenal job of making solar energy efficient and cost-effective, but we haven’t done anything to make it circular and manage the end of life of solar panels,” says Suvi Sharma, CEO of solar technology company Solarcycle.

Typically, solar panels are made of glass and contain small amounts of silicon, which converts sunlight into electricity, as well as silver, copper, and toxic heavy metals like cadmium, lead, and selenium. The panels can only be transported via pre-approved routes and disposed of in a special way. Because solar panels are fragile and bulky, trained workers are needed to properly unclip, transport, and dispose of them. Otherwise, there is a high risk that the solar panel will break and pollute local areas with hazardous substances.

According to Harvard Business Review, by 2031, the volume of solar energy waste in landfills is expected to exceed the volume of new installations. Scientists also calculated that between 2016 and 2050, the volume of solar energy waste will be from 54 to 160 million tons. For comparison, this is less than 10% of the volume of electronic waste, but due to the hazardous components in their composition, if improperly processed, solar panels can cause much more harm to nature and humans than other waste.

Unprofitable but necessary recycling

Recycling solar panels is not the most profitable business. Each battery can produce $2–4 worth of materials, while the recycling process, according to estimates by the American National Renewable Energy Laboratory, costs $20–30.

Nevertheless, there are those who want to influence the problem. At the end of June 2023, ROSI opened a plant in France that specializes in recycling solar energy waste. The company extracts and reuses 99% of solar panel components. The new factory can recover almost all of the precious materials contained in the panels  —  they are particularly difficult to extract from the installation  —  and send them to re-manufacture batteries. In France, 30,000 tons of photovoltaic panels that have reached the end of their service life will need to be recycled by 2030.

In the United States, the area covered by solar panels that are installed in 2021 and are scheduled to be decommissioned by 2030 will be the size of about 3,000 American football fields. In the States, Solarcycle promises to contribute to solving this problem. Its team extracts and sends about 95% of the materials from old solar panels for recycling. The company sells recovered silver and copper on commodity markets, and Solarcycle sells glass, silicon, and aluminum to solar panel manufacturers and operators.

One of the most effective ways to stimulate panel recycling is to subsidize this activity and oblige manufacturers to engage in their environmentally friendly disposal. In the EU, such rules are already in place: manufacturing companies must service equipment until it wears out, and also recycle panels when they finally fail. In the US, special requirements for solar panel recycling exist only in a few states.

Electric cars: The smaller the carbon footprint, the bigger the carbon footprint

According to the IEA, in 2024, sales of electric vehicles set a record of 17 million units, exceeding 20% of the total number of cars sold worldwide for the first time. By 2030, there will be about 250 million. For example, in Russia, as of early 2025, there are 60 thousand electric cars and more than 2,400 electric buses. Over the past three years, more than 35 thousand electric cars have been sold (more than half of the existing “electric fleet”), and sales volume has increased almost 6 times.

Around the world, governments and automakers are promoting electric vehicles as a key green technology that will limit oil consumption in the fight against climate change. General Motors said it intends to stop selling new cars and light trucks with gasoline engines by 2035 and switch to battery-powered models. Volvo will move even faster, introducing an all-electric lineup by 2030. Most electric cars do produce significantly fewer emissions than gasoline-powered cars. However, much depends on how much coal is burned to charge them.

“If your electric car plugs into the grid and forces nearby coal-fired power plants to burn more coal to charge it, then the climate benefits of using it are not going to be as great,” says Jeremy Michalek, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. The good news is that most countries are working to clean up their electricity grids and switch to alternative energy sources.

What to do about batteries and human rights

The lithium-ion batteries that power most electric cars use cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements. Mining cobalt and other metals from ores produces polluting slags. 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, much of it in unregulated artisanal mines where workers, including children, dig the metal out of the ground using only hand tools. They put their health at great risk.

Lithium is mined in Australia and in the salt flats of the Andes, in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Large amounts of groundwater are used to pump out the brines. Electric vehicle batteries require 50% more water to produce than traditional internal combustion engines.

To remedy this, manufacturers need to think about how to make the extraction process more environmentally friendly and how to improve working conditions for miners in the mines.

There are also problems with the disposal of battery packs. The average battery of an electric vehicle that travels 20,000 km per year can last from ten to 20 years. Burying batteries in landfills is a direct threat to the environment, and 95–96% of the battery content is recyclable raw material that can be reused in production. But why is their recycling not so simple?

Currently, recycling technologies based on the principle of breaking and crushing battery elements are used in the world. However, this process is quite energy-intensive, and the quality of the recovered raw materials is low. To increase the efficiency of recycling, it is necessary to dismantle the batteries into a set of individual battery modules. And here lies the main problem  —  the lack of standardization of designs.

According to international standards, each element must be recycled, but current batteries for electric vehicles are created by manufacturers in configurations of varying technical and chemical complexity. They are not optimized for easy disassembly, either manually or automatically. Therefore, in the near future, it will be necessary to create a single standard or marking that will simplify and robotize the battery recycling process  —  this will increase its economic efficiency.

About a hundred companies around the world are engaged in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. These are small laboratories, specialized and non-specialized organizations, as well as industrial enterprises. However, the greatest efficiency is demonstrated by automakers that create separate factories or workshops for their batteries. For example, Volkswagen launched a battery recycling plant in Salzgitter in 2021. A year earlier, Tesla began recycling 100% of batteries by creating a recycling line at its battery factories. Nissan, together with Sumitomo Corporation, founded 4R Energy, a company that recycles batteries from the manufacturer’s electric vehicles.

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