Giving life to scrapped wind-mill wings!

What do you do with 57 enormous wind-turbine blades after the turbines they came from are retired? In Lund, Sweden, they became part of a parking garage. The Niels Bohr car park uses sections of rotor blades from Vattenfall’s decommissioned Nørre Økse Sø wind farm in Denmark. Instead of sending the blades toward disposal, they were cut into sections and incorporated into large parts of the building’s façade as non-load-bearing walls. Wind-turbine blades are notoriously difficult to recycle because they are built from durable composite materials such as glass or carbon fibre, resins and other components designed to withstand years of demanding weather conditions. That durability is useful during their working life, but it makes conventional recycling much more complicated. The Lund project takes a different approach: instead of breaking the material down, it keeps the existing material intact and gives it another purpose. The five-story car park has 365 spaces, 40 charging points, solar panels and an energy-storage system. The reused blades are visible throughout large sections of the façade, turning what could have been a difficult waste problem into part of the building itself. It’s a good example of a simple idea behind the circular economy: Before asking how we can throw something away, perhaps we should ask whether we can give it another life