Discarded wind turbine blades in Sweetwater, Texas. A warning sign.
By 2050, studies project up to 43 million metric tons of cumulative wind-blade waste and 60–78 million metric tons of solar-panel waste globally.
That’s roughly 100–120 million metric tons of end-of-life material. And that doesn’t include the massive mining, manufacturing, transportation and construction footprint required to produce and install it—or the challenge of recycling much of it.
Today, roughly 90% of used solar panels end up in landfills per the EPA. Wind turbine blades are technically recyclable, but recycling them remains difficult and often uneconomical.
This is the “clean” energy waste problem nobody wants to talk about.
See Toomy from Landman explain this phenomenon:
