A West Texas company has evidently tried to play fast and loose with solid waste disposal laws when it comes to decommissioned wind turbines.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a temporary injunction requiring a company accused of illegally stockpiling thousands of wind turbine blades in West Texas to stop accepting additional shipments and begin cleaning up the sites.
The temporary injunction, signed Tuesday by a Travis County district judge, applies to Global Fiberglass Solutions of Texas LLC, its affiliated companies, and company official Donald Lilly. It prohibits the defendants from accepting or disposing of additional industrial or municipal solid waste at two Sweetwater facilities while requiring them to begin removing the existing stockpiles.
Paxton sued the company in February, alleging it had illegally accumulated more than 3,000 discarded wind turbine blades, nacelles, and other materials at two facilities in Sweetwater in violation of Texas solid waste laws.
“This is a victory for protecting the land, health, and safety of the people of Texas,” said Paxton.
“No new wind turbine blade shipments will be accepted at these illegal sites and the defendants are now legally required to begin cleaning up the thousands of discarded blades they irresponsibly abandoned in Sweetwater.”
Sweetwater is on I-20 west of Abilene.
“We will not allow Texas land to be used as an illegal dumping ground.”
According to the attorney general’s office, Global Fiberglass Solutions was hired by multiple companies to break down and recycle wind turbine blades but instead created massive stockpiles at the Nolan County sites.
The company first came under scrutiny in 2018 after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality received an anonymous complaint. Investigators found the company was conducting recycling operations without notifying the agency and was accumulating wind turbine blades beyond the threshold allowed to remain exempt from solid waste permitting requirements.
Although TCEQ entered into an agreed order with the company in 2022 requiring it to obtain permits or remove the waste, investigators later found additional turbine parts had been delivered to one of the abandoned facilities without the required permits.
Wind turbine blades are made of fiberglass, which is very hard to recycle. Basically you have to shred them up, melt them and then pour them into new molds. Evidently Global Fiberglass Solutions just thought they’d take the same shortcut so many municipalities have by simply omitting the expensive “recycling” part of the recycling cycle.
But because I’m a waste-not, want-not sort of guy, I have a modest proposal to solve the dilemma of having too many wind turbine blades: use them for segments of the border wall.
Most “modest proposals” are satire, but this one is earnest. There simply aren’t good uses for used wind turbine blades, but I’m pretty sure they would make formidable obstacles on the still-in-progress border wall with Mexico. Set them up and embed them in concrete with the curving part of the blade angled up over the Mexican side, so illegal aliens face the exceptionally difficult task of climbing a surface curving up over their heads. Lay them in end-to end for a continuing unbroken wall. Put razor-wire at top if necessary.
It’s not a perfect solution, as it can be defeated by things like climbing equipment, long ladders and battery-powered sawzalls, but those are things that can defeat other segments of the wall, and typically not carried by the average illegal alien or coyote. Patch with concrete and reinforce as necessary.
Obviously, decommissioned wind turbine blades can’t be used for the entirety of the wall, or even the remaining segments. (Just how much remains to be built is unclear, and I’m getting an “access denied” when trying to reach U.S. Customs and Border Protection smart wall map.)
While not a perfect solution, using wind turbine blades to build part of the border wall kills two birds with one stone, since a bunch of blades are just sitting in Texas already…
Tags: Border Controls, border fence, Donald Lilly, Global Fiberglass Solutions of Texas LLC, Ken Paxton, Lawsuit, Sweetwater, Texas, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), waste disposal, wind power
Read somewhere that every mid-to-large wind turbine requires something like 500 gallons of lubricant/hydraulic fluid and that when they break down – which is more frequent than people think – they tend to dump a lot of lubricant all over the place. Someone needs to get photos and make a meme.
FRP resins are generally flammable.
Use old wind generator blades as wind-breaks just up wind of highways. Most states use wood, why not use something that will last longer and not kill trees? Or use them as wind-breaks for cattle ranches in MT and WY. Ranchers build one wall wind-breaks to give cattle something to hide behind, use fiberglass instead. No roof needed for a wind-break.
Or cut the blades into 4’x8′ fiberglass replacements for sheetrock and use them as a replacement for Tyvek on sheds and barns. Things will last forever. Cut the curvier ones into 2’x4′ panels. Use the pointy edge of the blades as roof crests.
A few years ago, a scientist somewhere [citation needed] made turbine blades into gummies.
https://duck.ai
“tell me about the guy who made wind turbine blades into gummies”
The blades are hollow, yes? To make them more effective border wall components, once in place, fill them with concrete.
You really can’t recycle fiberglass. You can bury them or sink them in the deep ocean. Or you can burn them until nothing is left but a puddle of dirty glass which you can then bury or sink in the ocean because it’s useless for making bottles or windows.
[…] I HATE THOSE THINGS: Wind Turbine Blade Dump Disposal Drama (Plus A Modest Proposal). […]
Using the blades for the border wall is a decent idea.
Especially if you can get them to rotate horizontally near the ground, rather than the normal vertical way hundreds of feet above in the sky. You can even stagger or alternate their heights to make it that much more difficult for someone to try and parkour inbetween the spinning blades.
Many de ades ago North Carolina funded research on fiberglass recycling.
What they found was.both simple and profoundly logical.
The stuff doesn’t break down in the usual “organic material way, it is too stable of a molecule, the polyester resin.
And the “long fiber” performance of the glass fibers….
Anyway…it makes wonderful, and some mightsay, ex ocptional, road base.
Aren’t the resins needed to make fiberglass derived from ‘fossil fuels’?
Shhhh not so loud…The Greta might hear you!
If you follow the details, you will learn that (a) the blades are designed to last 25 years or more.
But the operators are given opportunity to re-up their subsidies after 10 years by re-turbineing their farms. So they replace them after 10 years to milk the subsidies!
I sent President Trump this exact idea in an email during his first term.