[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-no...
That being said, yes, the recycling (and presumably also the environmental impact while they are running and constantly weathered) of these composites remains problematic. But they don't end up in land fills in Germany, at least:
https://www.energieagentur.nrw/blogs/erneuerbare/beitraege/r...
For materials like the blades, we need to compare this to alternatives. The lack of recycling may be insignificant compared to the amount of materials consumed by non-renewable power sources (e.g. coal, oil), purely in terms of environmental impact from mining the materials, let alone GHG emissions.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... “Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.”
In Sweden we are making wind power company owners very rich with heavily subsidies, wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.
How much of the inputs into fossil fuel generators are recycled? Massively more coal, gas, oil etc. is consumed than the amount of wind turbine blades that will go to landfill. Then there’s the byproducts - in Australia, coal ash is literally 22% of all waste generated across the whole country per year. It just goes to landfill!
That’s a far cry from “no way”.
Those 85% are actually 15% in effective.
Best examples would be devices like phones/microwave/tv they contain lots of those rare materials.
Industrial simply prefer to sell junks for cheap in bulk to the African continent where very poor people burn those junks to extract the rare minerals.
It’s not as simple as « 100% recyclable = Always Recycled »
This is certainly not universally true...for example: https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2019/07/10/vattenfall-...
The wind power industry cares and is actively asking for political incentives to change this: https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry...
And it begs the question, the waste was a known factor before even starting building turbines, why start asking for this now instead of twenty years ago. To me it feels very much like a problem once wanted to be swept under the rug now becoming too much to handle.
I really doubt this is true in any meaningful sense. First of all, I'd expect the majority of all turbines ever produced to still be in their useful service life. Second, many of the materials are valuable as scrap. It would be blatantly idiotic to just destroy and bury these materials, even if your goal is to spite environmentalists. Third, even the unsubsidized cost of wind turbines is not that high. These materials don't just appear out of thin air, they're accounted for in the costs.