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From wind turbine blades, to the actual tower of the structure. The nacelle can be re-used after decommissioning, as a tiny house. This one looks to be the size of a large caravan or a mobile home.

Yet another recycling plant has gone on fire. This may be caused by spontaneous combustion from the heaps of material. Smoke and potential for fumes are the main hazard to residents.



"A large number of firefighters were called to the scene of a fire at a recycling plant in Co Derry.

The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service said the alarm was raised over the fire at the site on the Craigmore Road in Coleraine just after 2am.

A spokesperson said there was nobody in the building at the time.

However they added that it was too early to say what the scale of damage would be.

A total of 67 firefighters attended the scene and used eight pumping appliances, two aerial appliances, and two water tankers to try extinguish the fire."

"Sustainable Fashion Educator Miriam Keegan says the scale of pressure on international markets is immense and she believes local authorities now need to look beyond clothing banks to deal with the issues.

"We have a massive problem. Research suggests we have enough clothing on the planet for the next six generations.

"In Ireland we generate approximately 170,000 tonnes of post consumer textiles per year, which is about 35kg per person per year.

"When you compare that to the EU average of 26kg per person, there's clearly an issue.

"In Ireland, we don't take full responsibility for the end of life of our clothing, so we have to send it somewhere else around the world.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the time that is the global south - developing countries that are just not able to cope with the magnitude of the clothing - so it ends up in their landfills and completely covers their cities and their beaches."

Ms Keegan said there needs to be a mindset shift about how people use clothes."

An interesting statement, a mindset shift on fashion.

Fashion is a global industry at all levels which needs a global solution.

Fashion is currently a disposable industry. In some ways it mirrors the plastic industry. People are only too glad to buy new fashion items and discard items that are still perfectly good but are no longer in fashion.

If it's trendy it can't be sustainable. It seems like the only way to control the production of clothes is control the disposal of clothes. Charging people a disposal cost might cause people to buy less clothing but that would be very unpopular.

The recycling of clothing has run into the same problem as recycling plastic has run into. It is getting more expensive to get rid of plastic because the places that use to accept plastic waste at discount prices have been raising their prices to accept plastic waste from other countries.

The garbage is piling up as it gets harder to ship it to some other place besides where it was initially disposed of. To dispose of the garbage is getting more expensive and there is no easy way to make it cheaper except by producing less garbage. Burning it or burying it also isn't getting any cheaper.

The fashion industry has one advantage. Much of the goods that are disposed of are still perfectly good, it's not garbage in the meaning of the word. If clothing could no longer be thrown out in the garbage and had to be disposed of at a used clothing center where one had to pay a small amount to have the fashion items taken off their hands. You could get credits for some items that you could use to purchase something at a later date.

These places would be like public landfills for clothing disposal. There would have to be fines for just dumping clothing on the street or in empty lots or in wildlands. None of this would be acceptable but there appears to be no other way of handling the ever increasing volumes of material.

Just like their are locations to buy clothes, and locations to clean the clothing, there would be disposal/resale locations to take in the used clothing once its no longer wanted.

Setting up used official licensed clothing centers to receive the no longer wanted clothing would provide clothing for people who aren't driven by fashion or can't afford to pay a lot for clothing. If these operations were effectively set up, they would eventually cause a decrease in the sale of new clothing. The sellers of new, trendy, fashionable clothing wouldn't like it but there would be nothing they could do.

On average 2 percent of the global consumer economy is based on fashion. Europe and the US spend 3 to 4 percent on fashion. Japan spends about 3 to 5 percent. Australia spends about 1.5 to 2 percent. The Chinese consumer market is 10 to 15 percent based on fashion which isn't surprising because China produces about 40 percent of the global fashion market. India spends about 8 to 10 percent on fashion while it supplies about 4.6 percent of the global market putting it in 4th place. Bangladesh is in second place, supplying about 8 percent of the global fashion market while it's citizens spend about 1 to 2 percent on fashion. Viet Nam is in third place and it's consumer spending on fashion runs around 2 to 3 percent.

According to Microsoft copilot, worldwide consumer spending on fashion is projected to grow significantly. By 2029, global spending on clothing and footwear is expected to reach approximately $2.8 trillion, marking a substantial increase of over 22% compared to 2024. This growth is driven by factors such as rising disposable incomes, expanding e-commerce platforms, and increasing demand for sustainable and ethical fashion.

During this same period, 2024 to 2029, the global population is expected to grown from 8.2 billion to 8.5 billion. That is barely 4 percent. This means the average person will be buying more clothing not less. Sustainable and ethical fashion clothing will drive up the cost of clothing as it will be more expensive but it won't reduce the amount of fashion items produced.

Its actually a fragile market. 20 percent of new fashion industry businesses go out of business in the first year. The use and securing of natural fibers versus plastic, creating new business opportunities and maintaining old businesses, employment, disposal of the used clothing, countries hoping to increase their citizens employment, and exports by increasing fashion production, it's all locked together with no way reducing it without causing a lot of disruption. Providing for the lost income and jobs is not an option at this time.

Handling the clothing once it has been produced has nothing to do with the pollution of land, water, and air, in the manufacture of materials to make into clothing and other fashion items and the eventual disposal of the those items. These are problems which should have had some kind of impact on the fashion industry but never have.

"Setting up used official licensed clothing centers to receive the no longer wanted clothing would provide clothing for people who aren't driven by fashion or can't afford to pay a lot for clothing. "

Here we call those charity shops.

We have them too but the amount of clothing that is processed would have to go way up to handle the amount of clothing that goes to other countries and into landfills. The used clothing operations cherry pick what they keep and handle only a small fraction of the total amount of material.

"Today, there are many challenges with clothing recycling, and only about 1% of old clothing textiles are recycled into new clothing items, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The numbers are slightly higher in Denmark, with 6% of garments being recycled, but still far lower than recycling rates for other materials, including plastic packaging, in the country."

In the U.S., a significant amount of used clothing is exported, approximately 700,000 tons annually, while only a small portion, around 15%, is recycled or reused domestically, with the rest ending up in landfills.

Clothing made from recycled materials is not usually made from clothing.

The used clothing business is unable to handle the volume of material that is being thrown away. They would have to be completely reconfigured. It would be similar to recycling bottles except the clothing could not be treated the same way the bottles are treated, kept out doors, open to the elements. It might however be shredded.

The used clothing is composed of natural fibers, plastic fibers, or combinations of different materials. It might be possible to recycle spent clothing easier than it is to recycle non clothing plastic items. With clothing however, once the label is off, it becomes very expensive to sort it all out. Some stores have experimented with having recycle bins in the store where it is much easier to sort it out. This would still require labor time and money.

The charity shops have to be reconfigured to process the flow of used clothing the same way the garbage industry handles the daily flow of garbage except the used clothing that wasn't sold would have to be distributed to where it is needed and not end up as garbage, and whatever can be recycled is processed, with burning it or burying the last resort.

The mind set that needs changing involves everyone from the consumer, the manufacturer, the designers, the merchants, to the processors of the spent clothing.

"Until then, as fashion shows no signs of lessening production or changing its dependence on consumerism and mass production, one has to wonder if fashion's interest in closing the loop is really about climate change and sustainability. Perhaps recycling schemes are more about removing consumer guilt, so shoppers remain content with treating fashion as disposable and continue buying from them despite growing climate concerns."

Any fabrics that charity shops can't sell as clothing, they sell as industrial rags. But there might be no worth any more if the market is flooded.

I suggest the size of the problem seen in Ireland, for size of population, is caused by a large new immigrant population. These include students, workers, and refugees.

Coming from Ukraine or India, you don't bring more than one or two bags, so you need to buy clothes. You are renting space and maybe moving often. You are not going to buy dear clothes, just light ones you can discard with the change of seasons or when they get too worn. Families are coming from Ukraine, and kids grow. They need new clothes often.

The native population can also only buy the clothes that are in the shops. I've said before in various places, that one bitterly cold spring day, with hail falling, I went into a city centre shop Penneys to buy jeans. There were no jeans except in a small corner for menswear. The entire shop was full of see-through blouses and fluorescent bras. These might work in Bangladesh where they were probably made, but not in Irish weather.

"About 200 turbines are generating electricity across Estonia, and the oldest wind farm in Virtsu in Pärnu County has been operating for over 20 years.

In the coming decades, the state and developers will face the question of what to do with wind turbine components that have reached the end of their service life.

Estonian renewable energy producer Enefit Green is already looking into the issue.

"Enefit Green also has turbines that have completed 20 years of service and for which we have received a 10-year life extension, meaning they will run for 30 years. New turbines are already designed to operate for 30 years, according to the standard," said Innar Kaasik, a management board member.

"If we look ahead, then starting around 2030, we may reach the point in Estonia when a larger number of wind turbines will start going into decommissioning and recycling," he said.

Responsibility lies with their owner, which is usually the wind farm developer.
...
"The Ministry of Climate said a wind turbine is categorized as a structure, and its handling must comply with the Waste Act. This means that landfilling should be avoided, and reuse and recycling should be prioritized.

"We are interested in a broad-based approach. We want Estonia's entire waste management system to be as advanced as possible, so that as much material as possible is returned to circulation," said Ivo Jaanisoo, deputy secretary general for living environment and circular economy at the Ministry of Climate.
...
"A wind turbine is made up of various metals: steel, copper, aluminum, and different composite materials. The 90 percent that consists of the tower, nacelle, and various metallic parts, we already know very well today how to recycle those," said Jaana Kurgpõld, sales manager for the Baltics and Scandinavia at Vestas.

The biggest question is how to recycle the blades. Options for processing are being explored.

"These are made of composite materials, and since a turbine is designed to last and withstand very strong forces and various wind conditions, the blades are made of carbon and glass fibers, epoxy resin, paint, and foam. It has been very, very difficult to break them down into separate components and recycle them," Kurgpõld explained.

She said Vestas has been working on a solution to the problem for the past few years.

"The solution is a solvent into which the blade is dipped, and as a result, the wind turbine blade breaks down into its base components," Kurgpõld told this show.

Within five years, it may be possible to recycle turbine blades in larger volumes using this method, she said."

"Those well-meaning agitators at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) are back, this time with an interactive "Electronic Waste Graveyard" cataloging a range of devices tossed aside after software support expires or cloud connections flatline.

The US-based non-profit has campaigned against the growing tide of electronic waste for years, and its latest effort is an online "rogues' gallery" showcasing more than 100 tech products that no longer function properly or were effectively junked after manufacturers ended support.

Most Reg readers will be aware of the situation with smartphones, which are typically backed by security updates and bug fixes for maybe 2 to 3 years after the release of the device � tough luck if you happen to buy one that has already been on the market for a while.

No, they won't suddenly stop working. However, once the vendor stops patching flaws, it will become increasingly risky to use any internet-connected product.

The Electronic Waste Graveyard lists a whole bunch of devices, covering the gamut from laptops to smart watches, car accessories and kitchen gadgets. It calculates the total weight of all the dead widgets, and allows users to sort the list by brand, category and the type of lost support.
...
"The interactive gallery also lists a number of Chromebook models that similarly lost software updates after a number of years, which PIRG previously highlighted in a report entitled "Chromebook Churn."

This hit schools and students, who often buy the devices for their lower price tag. PIRG successfully lobbied Google, the developer of the software platform, to extend the update period.

However, only Chromebooks released from 2021 onward automatically get ten years of updates, as we previously reported."

I recycled household materials yesterday.
A recycling centre went on fire, in another part of the country, I hasten to add. This must happen from spontaneous combustion of the materials, as it's been cold and wet here lately, not hot and dry, and such fires always make me wonder what the best solution is. Piling everything together seems to be asking for trouble.



"The fire was contained to the area of the site where materials that are due to be recycled are stored.

One of the country's largest waste management firms, Thornton's Recycling also suffered a serious fire at its Killeen Road facility in Ballyfermot in 2021.

Meanwhile, Cork County Council has said that a fire at a commercial recycling facility at Knockgriffin in Midleton has also been brought under control."

Solar panels have 25 year life, at present. France has started recycling the materials into new solar panels.

Tennis balls.
They don't decompose.

-

Dan Sherrard-Smith

"330 million tennis balls produced annually.

Each takes 400 YEARS to decompose.

MWO design has come up with THE solution.

They're transforming discarded tennis balls...

...into stunning sound-absorbing material.

It's called Soundbounce.

Each square meter uses 283 upcycled tennis balls.

That's 8.5kg of CO2 saved per square metre."


The video tells us tennis is the 14th most polluting sport in the world. I'm thinking tennis ball surfaces on a room wall or chair would collect a lot of dust and hair. This isn't something I'd want in my home for that reason, plus microplastics. But it's a good start at looking at the waste balls and what we should be doing with them.
I've suggested the balls could be ground up to fill the Lego type hollow blocks for house building.