You’re likely to have seen a wind turbine blade near the beginning of its life, riding on a flatbed trailer pulled by a semi with a truck behind to warn drivers behind. At the end of its life, there’s a problem.
In a landfill, the huge blade can last “forever.” The same is true of carbon-fiber bike frames and sailboat hulls. A rescue may be at hand. Ciaran Lahive and 15 colleagues at 3 institutes in Golden, Colorado just put together a multi-step method to dissolve the plastic resins and recover both the resin chemicals and the pricey carbon fibers.
They break up the solids into modest chunks and heat them in concentrated acetic acid at not-quite oven cleaning temperatures of 280oC under high pressure nitrogen gas. Everything comes out nearly fully clean and the parts – resin monomers and carbon fibers – are recovered by standard methods of distillation, filtration, and washing. It will be something to observe at pilot plant or commercial scale.
I have some of the hyper-pungent glacial acetic acid; note also that many resins include bisphenol - a of notoriety as a disruptor of our endocrine system. Keep it well capped! Good luck!
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
Source: Nature 19 June 2025, pp. 605 ff.
