SNP rejects banning wind turbine blades from landfills 

The SNP could send old wind turbines to landfill. It has rejected a European-style ban on “wind turbine graveyards”.

Austria, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands have already banned giant fibreglass and plastic blades from landfill sites.

A number of other countries are expected to follow suit amid concerns about what to do as the first generation of wind farms is decommissioned. It is safe to put the old blades in to the ground – but they take up a huge amount of space.

The Scottish government, which has been a major supporter of wind power, said it was looking at recycling and reuse options for the blades, some of which have a sweep as big as a football pitch.

A spokesman said: “While the Scottish government does not currently have any plans to impose a landfill ban on the disposal of wind turbines in Scotland we are working with industry to ensure that all options around reuse and recycling of materials are explored before any wind farm components are sent to landfill.

“This includes a commitment to position Scotland as a European hub for the reuse and refurbishment of turbine parts by improving the Scottish and UK-wide supply chains and the establishment of a specialist blade treatment in Scotland.”

In America blades have been sawn up and buried in graveyards in the plains states, with hundreds at a site in Wyoming. There are attempts to develop new recyclable technology and think of ways of re-using the existing structures.

Maurice Golden, a Scottish Conservative MSP who has significant professional expertise in recycling, claimed the “SNP’s lack of vision on tackling climate change is astonishing”.

He said: “Scotland should be leading the way in decommissioning wind turbines and a landfill ban on blades is one way to pump-prime the market. The SNP have presided over a litany of broken promises on climate change from thousands of jobs which have never materialised to their humiliating climbdown on ditching their own climate change targets.”

Kim Pratt, a Friends of the Earth Scotland circular economy campaigner, said turbine blades must not become Scotland’s “largest single-use items which are dumped or burned rather than reused or recycled.”
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She said: “Given the importance of wind turbines in protecting our environment, it is only right that these vital materials are put back into use wherever possible. The Scottish government must put in place plans now on how to manage wind turbines, so that end-of-life plans can be incorporated into the management of these machines.

“The producers or users of these turbines must be made to take responsibility for reducing their environmental impact throughout every stage of that product’s life cycle.”

Many of Scotland’s first generation of wind turbines built in the late 1990s and early 2000s are reaching the end of their operational life and being replaced by more modern versions.

Scotland’s first wind farm, Hagshaw Hill, near Douglas in Lanarkshire, which opened 29 years ago, is being “re-powered” by Scottish Power Renewables (SPR) with the first generation of turbines dismantled.

Crucially, while 90 per cent of wind turbine materials are easily recyclable – steel, aluminium and copper – blades are not as they are made from fibreglass bound together with a strong epoxy resin which is difficult to break down.

This makes them difficult and expensive to recycle with large-scale solutions neither widely available nor cost effective.

SPR says it can’t put a figure on the number of blades decommissioned annually but confirmed that 78 blades from Hagshaw Hill were still in storage.

A spokesman said: “Wind farm decommissioning isn’t a routine annual process, so we don’t have yearly figures – Hagshaw Hill is the first site we have decommissioned for re-powering in Scotland.

“We are actively working on a UK-based solution for the management of the decommissioned blades, the details of which are currently commercially sensitive.”

Zero Waste Scotland estimates that more than 5,600 onshore turbines will be decommissioned by 2050 – about 250 turbines a year by 2040.

With three blades per turbine it means Scotland alone will be faced with having to recycle at least 16,800 of the seven-ton units before decommissioned offshore blades are factored into the equation.

While industry battles to find large-scale, economically viable solutions to the recycling of turbine blades most discarded blades end up in landfill or incinerated.

Innovative solutions such as repurposing blades into playgrounds or bike sheds cater for only a tiny fraction with the sheer volume involved necessitating solutions on a far bigger scale.

Pressure group Scotland Against Spin, which campaigns for the reform of the government’s wind energy policy, says the Scottish government has had 25 years to come up with a solution.
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Aileen Jackson, a spokeswoman for the group, said: “It is hypocritical of the Scottish government not to ban blades from landfill when it is constantly boasting about being a world leading light on environmental issues.

“Disposing of blades in landfill would be contrary to everything the Scottish Government is seeking to achieve in its recently lodged Ecocide Bill, which aims to prevent and criminalise the most severe forms of environmental harm.

“The point, of course, is that the environmental impact of non-recyclable blades should have been dealt with long before it arrived at the stage where decommissioning is now taking place.”