Will You Take My Hand? - A Poem By Paul Vincent Cannon

Startup converts used wind turbine blades into boats, recycling fibreglass and resins

Individual sheets of fibreglass are notoriously difficult to recycle. Once layered together with resin — to form bathtubs, roofing panels, or aircraft components — peeling them back apart usually means shredding the end product into tiny pieces, then submerging them in tubs of heated solvent under high pressure. Needless to say, the recovered shreds of fibre and glass are not especially useful, or cheap.

This is a problem for the wind industry, whose turbine blades are essential hundred-metre-long, fibreglass tubes. Once they’ve served their 30-year-lifespans, unloading them on landfills is unpopular at best, banned (in some countries) at worst.

Getting around the “submersion problem” took a team of boatbuilders from Pleasantville, Nova Scotia to work out. While researching sustainable boat materials, Nick Bigeau — a professional boatbuilder for 15 years — came across recyclable resins, and the possibility of recovering and reusing intact sheets of fibreglass from otherwise inseparable end products.

“I had this idea of building a 17-foot boat with these resins,” says Bigeau. “Then I’d recycle it and build a replica from the recycled materials.”

Their “eureka moment” came in December 2022, and by September 2023, their new recycling method — called ReceTT — was patent-pending under the auspice of their new venture, Resolve Composites. It’s around this time that Bigeau became aware of the wind industry’s plight, and the potential of ReceTT to change the game. Why recycle a boat into a boat, he thought, when they could recycle a blade into a boat?

Siemens Gamesa is the second largest wind turbine manufacturer on the planet, and is leading the charge on recyclable resins in the wind industry. Recognizing the potential of ReceTT, in October 2023 they gifted Resolve Composites a 20-foot section of blade, 27 layers of fibreglass deep, held together by recyclable resin. By January 2024, Bigeau and his team had broken the blade into 162 kilograms of reuseable fibreglass sheets.

With this fibreglass, they’re constructing the hull of a Bantam Bay 17 Skiff, a project equal parts demonstration and experimentation — showing off the work of ReceTT while at the same time refining their methods. 

Canada's National Observer

Turning wind turbine blades into boats: Recycling fibreglass and resins

Individual sheets of fibreglass are notoriously difficult to recycle. This is a problem for the wind industry, whose turbine blades are esse

She Wonders - a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

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from Rosy Pirani, 08/May/2024: