one time I went over to a friend's house and their housemate was making paper in the living room, and we saw this big tub full of water they were using to dissolve old scrap paper into a slurry, and everyone was immediately like "oh, you need scrap paper?" and started turning out their jacket pockets and producing expired coupons and bus tickets and crumpled receipts and old shopping lists and whatever else they'd been carrying round with them for no good reason, and passing it all to the paper-making housemate to make sure it was suitable before it got torn up and dropped into the tub, while people took turns stirring the slurry with a big wooden stick. it was strangely ritualistic, like presenting an offering to some kind of temple elder for inspection before placing it in a watery shrine to be devoured and reformed. pulp for the pulp god.
This is the quilt my great-grandmother made from the ribbons her gravedigger son brought home when the funeral wreaths died and had to be thrown out. Back then, the ribbons were made of good-quality satin and it seemed a shame to let the fabric go to waste, so she washed and ironed them and kept them rolled up in a drawer until there were enough to make a quilt top. It's faded quite a bit over the decades and lost some of its sheen. The bedstead was hers, too.
(The shams are modern and made of quilter's cotton.)
This isn't a case of pay more to waste less; the mass-timber, blades cost around 20% less than carbon fiber and can build taller towers.
A company making wooden wind turbine blades has successfully tested a 50-meter-long prototype that’s set to debut soon in the Indian and European markets.
Last year, the German firm Voodin successfully demonstrated that their laminated-veneer timber blades could be fabricated, adapted, and installed at a lower cost than existing blades, while maintaining performance.
Now, Voodin has announced a partnership with the Indian wind company Senvion to supply its 4.2-megawatt turbines with these wooden blades for another trial run.
Wind power has accumulated more than a few demerit points for several shortfalls in the overall industry of this fossil-fuel alternative.
Some of these, such as the impact on bird life, are justified, but none more so than the fact that the turbine blades are impossible or nearly impossible to recycle, and that they need to be changed every 25 years.
Wind turbine blades are made from a mixture of glass and carbon fiber heated together with sticky epoxy resin, and these materials can’t be separated once combined, which means they go into landfills or are incinerated when they become too battered to safely operate.
GNN has reported that folks will occasionally find second-life value in these giant panels, for example in Denmark where they are turned into bike shelters. In another instance, they’re being used as pedestrian bridges.
But there are way more wind turbine blades being made every year than pedestrian bridges and bike shelters, making the overall environmental impact of wind power not all green.
“At the end of their lifecycle, most blades are buried in the ground or incinerated. This means that—at this pace—we will end up with 50 million tonnes of blade material waste by 2050,” Voodin Blade Technology’s CEO. Mr. Siekmann said recently. “With our solution, we want to help green energy truly become as green as possible.”
The last 15 years have seen rapid growth in another industry called mass timber. This state-of-the-art manufacturing technique sees panels of lumber heat-pressed, cross-laminated, and glued into a finished product that’s being used to make skyscrapers, airports, and more.
At the end of the day though, mass timber products are still wood, and can be recycled in a variety of ways.
“The blades are not only an innovative technological advancement but a significant leap toward sustainable wind production,” said Siekmann, adding that this isn’t a case of pay more to waste less; the blades cost around 20% less than carbon fiber.
Additionally, the added flexibility of wooden blades should allow for taller towers and longer blades, potentially boosting the output of turbine by accessing higher wind speeds.
Now partnered with Voodin, Senvion will begin feasibility analysis in the next few months, before official testing begins around 2027.
Researchers in Brazil tested second-life polycrystalline PV modules for two years and found they retained 87–88% of their original power, wi
From the article:
Researchers at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Brazil have conducted a 2-year testing on second-life polycrystalline solar modules deployed at their campus and have found that they can still ensure “stable” behavior, with performance consistent with annual degradation rates of up to 0.44%.
“Despite the many aspects making it a difficult sell, circular economy and sustainability issues might work in favor of second-life photovoltaic modules, due to the huge amount of panels that will become available with the exponential growth this technology is undergoing for nearly a decade,” the research's lead author, Ricardo Rüther, told pv magazine.
This is so cool! They found that solar panels over two decades old still retain 87-88% of their original functionality.
If somebody can figure out how to build a sustainable business around secondhand solar panels we could see the price of solar installations become shockingly cheap. And it would save so many resources to just re-use the existing mostly-functional-but-older solar panels rather than recycling them for parts.
