Bob Cappadonna, President and CEO of Environmental Solutions and Services at Veolia, joins the Disruptive Investing podcast to explain how his company has developed a process to recycle up to 98% of decommissioned wind turbine blades.
Key insights:
Blades vary significantly in composition across generations, containing fiberglass, carbon fiber, foam, wood, and steel, making a one-size-fits-all approach impossible.
The silica-rich fiberglass cannot be recycled back into new blades but is directly incorporated into cement as a replacement for raw mined silica.
Field cutting and shredding stations reduce blades to transportable bulk material before final processing at a centralized facility in Louisiana, Missouri.
The economics are driven less by commodity value and more by volume, landfill impact, and the reputational stakes of renewable energy being associated with landfill waste.
And Veolia has already recycled over 2,000 blades with demand currently outpacing their recycling capacity.