In 2006, a team of architects were tasked with building a playground with volumes that kids could crawl into and play. Jos de Krieger—then an intern, now a partner at the Rotterdam-based architecture practice Superuse Studios—remembers looking at airplane fuselages and grain siloes, before stumbling upon a stack of decommissioned wind blades in an industrial part of town. An idea was born.
Over the past 16 years, that idea has been tried and tested in half a dozen other projects across The Netherlands, where the architects have repurposed a total of 27 blades to make playgrounds, urban furniture, and a bus shelter. The latest edition was just displayed at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, in the form of a colorful climbing boulder made with parts of a 65-foot-long wind blade. The boulder was presented alongside a variety of other objects made with decommissioned blades, including a tiny prototype for a sound barrier and a signpost that could be used for signage
This is the first selection to see the light of day under a new company called Blade Made, which became a separate startup in 2021, in collaboration with Rotterdam-based New Citizen Design and US partner Newton Brown Urban Design. The idea is to create a viable business model for Blade Made to partner with wind farms, government organizations that manage public spaces, and contractors in order to create new opportunities for recycled wind blades. The idea being municipalities could choose a design from a Blade Made catalog, then hire a contractor to build it out. Eventually, de Krieger says they envision wind farms could pay a fee for Blade Made to take away their decommissioned blades, “just as they would pay any recycling agency to take their waste,” and earn some of it back when municipalities purchase a concept using their blades.
Design-wise, the possibilities are endless, in part because of the versatile shape of a wind blade, which is composed of three parts: the circular, hollow root; the tapered middle part; and the tip, which is mostly flat. In a perfect world, Blade Made wants to use the full length of those blades as often as possible. For the first playground, they used about 95 percent of five blades, each between about 80 and 100 feet long. Some blades were propped vertically to act as lighthouses or to support slides; others were laid flat and turned into a tunnel of sorts. Kids can crawl into the hollow root of the blade, and exit through a series of holes the architects cut out to meet local playground regulations. In another project, the team split one blade in three, planted each of them vertically, and carved out a seating area from each of them, including a skinny bench from the tip.
The wind energy market is projected to cross $180 billion by 2027, with many wind farms set to break ground along U.S. coastlines in the next decade or so. But most wind blades only last 20 to 25 years, and the majority of them remain virtually impossible to recycle, which means they end up buried in vast landfills like the infamous wind turbine blade graveyard in Wyoming. Put simply, more wind farms equal more waste, and companies will need to find solutions to the waste that awaits them a few decades from now—an estimated 2.2 million tons by 2050 in the U.S. By giving some of these blades a second lease on life, Blade Made isn’t saving them forever, but they are flattening the curve until we come up with more efficient recycling processes. As de Krieger points out, prolonging the life of the material also helps preserve its embodied carbon for longer.
For an initiative that started in 2006, the architects’ portfolio of built projects remains slim, but with a brand-new company focusing entirely on repurposed wind blades, they are hoping adoption will speed up, both in The Netherlands and the U.S., where they are looking to build one project next year.
Broadly speaking, ideas abound, from wind-blade bridges (like this one built by another company in Ireland last year) to sound barriers that could be built alongside busy highways and filled with plants to filter out the pollution. The demand for the letter seems to be there: de Krieger says the Netherlands builds more than 40 miles of sound barriers every year, mostly out of concrete, steel and glass. Replacing 10 percent of those materials with wind blades would use up all wind blade waste in the country, he says.
By comparison, as of 2010, the U.S. had 2,748 miles built along highways. How many wind decommissioned blades would it take to replace them all when they reach the end of their lifespan?
In terms of HVAC equipments, do you think there could be more circular re-use or innovative business model applications?
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