recyclable

No matter how beneficial increasing wind energy generation is, at the end of their lives, wind turbine blades end up in landfills. But now a major European wind turbine manufacturer — Denmark-based Vestas — has found a way to make the blades recyclable and circular. Unlike the vast majority of a turbine’s components that have established recycling circles, blade recycling has posed a serious challenge. That’s because of the presence of epoxy resin, a resilient substance that has so far proved…

Researchers at the University of Konstanz have developed a new plastic that is highly stable, biodegradable, and readily recyclable.How can plastics be designed so that they maintain their useful properties while also being more easily recyclable? Chemist Stefan Mecking and his research group at the University of Konstanz are focused on studying eco-friendly solutions for plastics. In their recent paper in the international edition of Angewandte Chemie, the team introduces a new polyester that exhibits material properties…

With the United States facing a , researchers from the University of Maine believe they may have found a solution to the problem. Using one of the world’s , the university’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) recently created the first . Finding a way to manufacture 3D-printed homes at scale is a challenge many have tried to tackle in . To date, most solutions have involved the use of concrete or clay and traditional building methods like wood framing. The ASCC’s “BioHome3D” is different. The center’s…

Photo: KAREN BLEIER / AFP (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.No plastic is truly recyclable — not even the water bottles and milk jugs that people usually toss into their blue bins.According to a new report released on Monday by Greenpeace USA, no plastic product meets a common industry standard for recyclability, even though they bear the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol. The report says industry-backed recycling labels on yogurt cups,…

We’ve known for years that plastic recycling rates are low, but they’ve managed to get even worse. The state of plastic recycling in the US is so abysmal that no plastic packaging can even be considered recyclable, according to a new report published today by environmental group Greenpeace. Households in the US tossed out 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, says the new report. Just 2.4 million tons of that plastic was recycled, or just under 5 percent — compared to 8.7 percent in 2018.With so little of the waste…

Photo: AtlasStudio (Shutterstock)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.Plastic recycling labels are everywhere: The ubiquitous “chasing arrows” symbol adorns everything from plastic bags and water bottles to kids’ toys.Most commonly, these symbols appear with a number — 1 through 7 — that identifies the type of plastic resin a product is made of. A number 1, for instance, corresponds to polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — the stuff that makes up water bottles.…

Early last month, Siemens Gamesa reported that recyclable turbine blades had been successfully installed at the Kaskasi offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Now the company has announced the market availability of an onshore equivalent.The company reports that, although around 85% of a wind turbines can be fully recycled at the end of their working lives, many of their huge blades end up in landfill. The RecyclableBlades project was created to change that.The key to making Siemens Gamesa's turbine blades recyclable after…

After getting the world’s first offshore wind turbine with recyclable blades up and spinning in August, Siemens Gamesa has just launched its RecyclableBlade for onshore wind power projects. The Siemens Gamesa RecyclableBlade for offshore was launched in September 2021 and installed at the 342 megawatt Kaskasi offshore wind farm in Germany in July 2022.  Siemens Gamesa has not yet said which sizes the recyclable onshore blades will be available in or when, nor how many recyclable onshore blades it’s produced so…

Old electronics are tricky to recycle, meaning they clog up landfills while locking valuable metals away. Now scientists have demonstrated printed circuits that can be degraded on demand, returning their materials to reusable forms.While many of us chase the excitement of a new phone every year or two, the problem of electronics waste only grows. Many of these devices aren’t built with recyclability in mind, and it’s hard to extract the precious metals like gold and silver from them for reuse. Instead, much of this…

Harvesting wind energy is an important part of the renewables mix, but when those huge turbine blades reach the end of their working lives, they could end up as waste in landfill. Siemens Gamesa has developed a recyclable blade that can be used to create new products when its wind-catching days are done.Though other wind turbine components, such as towers and nacelles, can already be recycled, the composite materials used to manufacture the huge blades in commercial wind farm installations have proven more of a challenge,…