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.
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.