Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; According to Michigan State University professor John Dorgan, making wind turbine blades out of edible resin would allow them to be recycled as food.
Wind turbine blades could be recycled into gummy bears, scientists say
Researchers design composite resin for blades that can be broken down to make new products including sweets
Chelsie Henshaw
Tue 23 Aug 2022 19.11 AESTThe next generation of wind turbine blades could be recycled into gummy bears at the end of their service, scientists have said.
Researchers at Michigan State University have made a composite resin for the blades by combining glass fibres with a plant-derived polymer and a synthetic one. Once the blades have reached the end of their lifespan the materials can be broken down and recycled to make new products including turbine blades – and chewy sweets.
Wind power is one of the dominant forms of renewable energy. However, turbine blades, usually made of fibreglass, can be as long as half a football field and cause problems with disposal, with many discarded in landfills when they reach the end of their use cycle.
…
“We recovered food-grade potassium lactate and used it to make gummy bear candies, which I ate,” said John Dorgan, one of the authors of the paper.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/23/wind-turbine-blades-could-recycled-gummy-bears-scientists
There is a small problem with this plan, if you expose edible plastic to an outdoor environment, or sometimes even an indoor environment, it tends to get eaten. One of the most extreme cases I personally witnessed, when I tried to start my hobby lathe a few years ago, nothing happened. I opened the gearbox housing and discovered something had eaten the rubber off my drive belt – all that was left was the string reinforcing.
Still I guess the recycled wind turbine gummy bears will add welcome variety to our future diet of edible insects and green party politicians.
This will be some very insanely expensive gummy bears. But they should make them look like Bald Eagles.
Taste like chicken (and bats for some reason).
Yes, the shapes of birds and bats in memorial of the critters that gave their lives so we could all experience brownouts and blackouts on a regular basis.
Blighty Bears can be the diverse (i.e. colorful), inequitable and exclusive (DIE) judgment, label, and entity assigned to The Envirocares Act.
To be honest, I’ve no clue what Blighty Bears are.
A British thing?
But most British (or even Americans?) don’t know about White Castles.
(But if we sent a few “Crave Cases” to the Ivory Towers, they leave in a hurry!8-)
The Blight Bear Project.
And would they dissolve the first time it rains?
They should expand when the get wet. Have you seen Gummy Bears soaked in vodka?
cant say its occurred to me to throw gummie bears in alcohol, no
…but now that someone’s mentioned it…
I saw my lab partner soaked in vodka once.
Gummy bears are food? Who knew?
Well, gummy seals are food for gummy polar bears. Or something.
Why do polar bears floss after eating?
Gummy seals, of course.
Who pays these geniuses to come up with these amazing ideas?
Good ol’ American ingenuity!
The leftards have a contest going on which is “who can come up with the most outrageous stupidity masquerading as science “
And get the biggest grant to pursue their “cutting edge science.”
“and green party politicians”.
Can you be sure that what ever has infected these greenies wouldn’t be passed on to us, if we were to make them useful, by eating them?
They were forced to eat
Robin’s MinstrelsGreen Politicians, and there was much rejoicing.Do the politicians have to be green or could we start in on them before they got that ripe?
Hasbeen, too big a risk to take!
Mad Cow Disease?
just mad
Mad, bad and dangerous to know!
Gain of function blades?
Win d turbine blades can recycled back to co2 and water and silica dust all it takes is a match and some balls
No need, they self destruct on their own pretty quickly, without anyone’s help.
You don’t believe they are being put into major wind turbine blade landfill sites?
https://stopthesethings.com/2020/05/13/the-big-cover-up-wind-industry-burying-millions-of-toxic-turbine-blades-in-landfills/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2021/03/16/the-tragedy-of-wind-turbine-blade-disposal/
For whatever reason, their flames generate a lot of soot, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons undoubtedly.
An anti-icing experiment gone wrong…
Ooh pretty. Well there’s something to look forward to next bonfire night (or 4th of July).
How the heck did the blade catch fire way out there?
With the added bonus of free protein from all the dead insects, bats and birds splattered across the blades
Win-Win
Not enough fiber glass in our diets?
What’s next? Solar panel smoothies?
My first thought..(after the stupidity thingy).
There’s no wind….
Have a sweetie
I have mine, but she likes to leave the room when I’m windy.
I think he should be processed into soylent green.
Instead of soylent green, hog slop would be a quicker, more efficient use of resources. I understand that pigs can digest stuff that would make us sick and then … bacon!
Pity we can’t recycle Michigan professors as wind turbines, increasingly the only useful thing that I think they could achieve. Educating the young appears to be beyond their remit.
Maybe we could assign him to huff and puff, whenever the wind isn’t blowing strongly enough?
Michigan STATE professors….
Well no, strictly speaking we can’t ‘recycle’ them as turbine blades. Would tying them to the turbine blades count?
They wouldn’t be collecting many insects here at the moment.
I fly remote control planes. I have my own strips down the paddock, & fly when conditions are good. I have flown every morning for the last 8 days. I keep a log of conditions just as I did when flying the real things.
The log says the same thing for the last 8 days. Calm, Overcast, Hazy, 21 degrees C.
I would hate to ne depending on wind or solar to be recharging my batteries.
Um, this is one of those times I definitey say, “You first and, especially, in this case, your kids first!
When did gummy bears become a desirable, healthy food for kids, anyway? Gee, I, always cooked from scratch with real food, drastically limited sugar and just can’t wait for my kids to feed my grandchildren plastic resin gummy bears laced with toxic rare earth metals. Yummy!
Call me crazy but I really think the climate change nutters have totally lost the plot with this one!
Exactly! The greenies were all committed tree huggers until the movement was co-opted into a anti-oil cult. Now who cares about forests or trees as long as paper bags replace plastic ones, or wide swaths of virgin territory is mowed down for wind and solar, and the web of wires and towers to connect them – oh, and all the new roads needed too. Strange how “back to nature” morphed into MORE rural development.
Ethanol fuel from food carbohydrates proves to be ruinous, so let’s use it for wind power, instead. Brilliant! Where’s the grant money?
Another way to reduce the food supply
If the resin is edible than something will starting the blades long before they are made into Gummy Bears or even Wine Gums.
If nature can consume the Titanic edible turbine blades will be a piece of cake
“If nature can consume the Titanic edible turbine blades will be a piece of cake”
Or just a free substrate to feed on..
Gummy Bears cake? ugh.
Potassium lactate is excellent for re-hydrating old leather (can’t fix deep cracking though), especially leather book covers. After it dries apply wax.
Eating it, no thanks.Why would you want to eat turbines blades?
“re-hydrating old leather”
This would have been most welcome during the Siege of Athens and Piraeus (87–86 BC). Inside the city, the population was reduced to eating shoe leather and grass.
That’s what the Romans did for the Greeks!
Fretslider
I suppose that means they wouldn’t have been vegans – but I have a terrible feeling that today’s green lobby would be quite happy to reduce the rest of us to eating grass and shoe leather, that’s where they have us heading.
They seem rather keen on promoting Insecta as the new food of the carbon free future. But first, the livestock farmers have to go
Except that serfs don’t need shoes.
Under the vegans, shoes will be made of grass.
‘That’s what the Romans did for the Greeks!‘
What, no aqueducts?
No that’s what the Greeks did for the Romans.
As if eating sugar hadn’t already gotten us into enough shit…..
The Potassium might be useful though, esp as during The SoilErodoWrongoCene as we now are, many are deficient in that vital neurotransmitter.
But you can overdo it and destroy your salt metabolism,
O-oh, salt is also wrong.
Scrub that new Ocene, just make it The (everything is) Wrongocene
or whaddabout the NutrientFreeMushOcene?
over to you………..
PS
Quote:”Hyperkalemia makes it hard for your nerve and muscle cells to work like they should. As a result, you may have muscle weakness, tiredness, paralysis, abnormal heart rhythms, chest pain, or nausea.
Double Trouble o-oh – I get that just at the mention of the words “Michael Mann’
(Sugar does it too)
If you’re averse to sugars my advice is ferment them.
Dandy vs. quicker.
“I opened the gearbox housing and discovered something had eaten the
rubber off my drive belt- all that was left was the string reinforcing”
Add lawn mower spark plug wire insulation & sump pump hose to your
list of edibles/nesting material. It’s quite hilarious climatistas worry
about animals surviving 1°C/2°C GW- they obviously never, ever dealt
with varmints. That’s why terriers & at times, us humans are so hyper!
“’It’s quite hilarious climatistas worry
about animals surviving 1°C/2°C GW”
I wonder how climatistas deal with the 5-10°C swing that happens every night, and the 60°C swing over just one year that plants put up with here in S. Ontario?
Or the 80C swing here in southern Manitoba
Just because something can be done doesn’t mean they should. With a few exceptions, recycling costs more than the cost of simply making new. I’m guessing that this is the case here. They are trying to green-ify so-called “green” energy. Laughable.
I was just driving through East Lansing a couple of weeks ago. With all the potholes and major detours for construction, it’s as if they used gummi bears instead of asphalt for the roads in the first place.
At least Michigan State has a decent football team. Nothing else works up there.
Made off with our head coach a couple of years ago and then our best running back.
I almost became a Spartan years and years ago.
gummies with glass fibres..dunno why Im not interested?
I dont know how youd ensure no shreds/shards remained
I know its not april 1 but this junky idea is a winner for that date!
Floss as you chew?
Awesome – you really made me LOL!
Every day is April 1 anymore…
Pray tell, how to separate the fibre glass from the “edible” components? Still if they can make liquorice jelly beans, I may just be interested.
My guess is that they dissolve the resin and then filter the solution. However, I’m not keen that any amount of filtering will remove any nano-sized particles generated by the process. After all, they probably have to grind the old blades up as part of the recovery procedure.
Progressive environmentalists have in the past decried the use of chemistry and technology in food production. Pesticides, fertilizers, additives and GMO techniques are all horrible in their view. But now re-processed resins from a plastic, even if partially derived from plants, are OK to eat?
I also wonder how much energy is needed to re-process the resins?
“making wind turbine blades out of edible resin would allow them to be recycled as food”
– and then they can join the new, eco-friendly car wiring insulation in being eaten by vermin. What a GREAT idea – rotating mass under high centrifugal stress being weakened and unbalanced by being eaten away!
“Let them eat wind turbine blades.”
— John Dorgan
It’s bad for your health – give it to Clown Joey Biden…..Joey will eat it!
Will these new sweets from wind turbines cause one to break wind?
“Ever eat a wind turbine? Many parts are edible.”—Euell Gibbons
The cost of recycling the resin could not possibly be cheaper than producing a gummy bear from fresh ingredients.
Another waste of somebody’s money to pay for this rubbish.
Surely there is a tax credit for that. The Wind Mill Blade Nay Edible Gummy Bear and Inflation Reduction Act.
If, after its useful life is over, a thing is fit only for indefinite burial for decomposition, it is NOT renewable.
Send them to the governor of Arizona, they can use them instead of shipping containers!
The land grant schools will not be outdone in stupidity.
“Dominant form of renewable energy” Kind of like the best female on a team of transgenders.
“Soylent Green is people!”
From the 1973 film “Soylent Green,” which was set in the year 2022 (!). A broad, drumbeat focus on recycling. Green New Deal. Global collapse. Wind turbine blades into candy. 2022.
https://youtu.be/8Sp-VFBbjpE
You can’t fix stupid!
Maybe they should start using licorice instead of lithium to make EV battery packs?
“combining glass fibres with a plant-derived polymer and a synthetic one. Once the blades have reached the end of their lifespan the materials can be broken down and recycled to make new products including turbine blades – and chewy sweets.”
Cue the lawsuits when someone finds a bit of glass in their gummy bears.
Society is overcome with the organic fad and hypersensitive to any chemical in their food or even the lining of the food containers (BPA for example) and this clown researcher is recommending people eat recycled stuff.
At best this is a biodegradable blade – yet one of the biggest problems with wind turbines, after power storage requirements, is that they don’t last as long as they should and the blades in particular degrade quickly and lose their aerodynamic efficiency, especially offshore turbines battered by windswept salt spray.
Why is the media full of this “environmentally friendly” junk tech announcements? Why don’t they divert some of the vast resources they have for “fact checking” any skeptical opinion, to b.s. checking stuff like this – surely any green minded person would be embarrassed and annoyed at such crap that patronizes people concerned about the environment.
It upsets the dogma.
Your dogma upsets my catma.
@ Eric W – I don’t think green party politicians are edible.
Just a tiny taste of them or their policies is toxic.
combining glass fibres
umm…
I realize they said break down and separate, but I still wouldn’t be willing to risk it.
Who would want to eat a gummy bear made from an eatable resin that’s been contaminated with 20-years worth of bugs, birds and dirt? The FDA would never approve the sale of those gummy bears.
Bugs, birds, and dirt are good for your diet! Haven’t you been following the science?
But I guess we all have to be worried about the fact that the blades will have been soaking for decades in a fluid with 400ppm CO2 – that might be dangerous!
If they make the blades elastic enough they may flap in wind and maybe even fly away!
Overlooking of course that anything made from fiberglass and resin is mostly fiberglass. The resin is just a binder. What does one do with all that fiberglass?
Hmm. Long pig roast, side of baked cricket, and fiberglass infused gummy bears for dessert.
Nah, I think I’ll stick with my current Labor Day plans…
Well, edible wind turbine blades could certainly be a source of fiber(glass) in everyone’s diet.
🙂
Somehow, gummy bears from spent wind turbine blades just strikes as a Bad Idea™.
It’s like trying to establish a nudist colony in Antarctica because there’s no one around. That’s another Bad Idea™.
Or you can just stop making windmill blades, problem solved.
Having served in the military I will tell you that if these things were installed in a warm, humid environment the various species of fungus would begin to attack it immediately. It would have mold and mushrooms and everything else growing out of it. Nature will find nutrients and use them. That is even before the bugs and birds get to it. Mold will begin probably within 24 hours.
I doubt they made any foodstuffs from their resins after 10-20 year exposure to sunlight, oxygen, heat, moisture, large diurnal variation, bacterial degradation.
The synthetic foods claim is concerning, since they did not mention original sources.
“plant-derived polymer” should excite many… Maybe XR and other terrorists can use it to glue themselves to roads and doors. Perhaps, they can chew on their own manacles.
Now that sounds like product from a process that is 100% dependent on hydro, nuclear or fossil fuel energy generation.
Make the out of wood and we can burn them to keep warm when the wind isn’t blowing.
Figures someone from that State up North would have such a stupid idea. Go Buckeyes!!!
“We recovered food-grade potassium lactate …”
So?
What percentage of the blades would be “food-grade potassium lactate”?
That still leaves most of it to end up in landfills.
(Along with the “gummies” that almost nobody will buy.)
What? Buy? Won’t they be pushing these FREE, like the jabs?