REGEN Fiber debuts heat-free, chemical-free turbine blade recycling at Fairfax facility - Des Moines Register

REGEN Fiber debuts turbine blade recycling process at Fairfax location

REGEN Fiber debuts heat-free, chemical-free turbine blade recycling at Fairfax facility
Ryan Hansen

A newly opened Fairfax facility debuted its brand-new turbine blade recycling process, touting it as a more environmentally friendly method of dealing with damaged or outdated turbine blades.

The patent-pending processing facility, operated by REGEN Fiber, is capable of shredding up roughly 12 tons worth of blades per hour. The process separates out the non-recyclable materials to create a shredded fiberglass composite.

Those varieties of shredded fiberglass come in both a fine powder and various sizes. Once the facility is up and running, those recycled materials are going to be made available for use in construction materials like concrete or asphalt at the discretion of the contractors.

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“It’s like a chef picking ingredients,” said Jeff Woods, Travero director of business development, holding various sizes of shredded turbine blade. One of the two- or three-inch shreds was about pinky-sized, while another variant was about a “toothpick” wide.

When these fiberglass shreds are inserted into construction materials, studies have found that their lifespans are extended, Woods said. The addition of fiberglass creates more durable, environmentally-resistant concretes, including ready-mix, asphalt and reinforced concrete, Woods said.

REGEN Fiber hosted a grand opening of the new facility along Lefebure Road just inside the Fairfax city limits on Wednesday. REGEN’s parent company, Travero, is a subsidiary of Alliant Energy.

In illustrative examples, REGEN employees showed off the process, from blade to shredding to use in concrete mixes.

Regular asphalt and asphalt mixed with fiberglass shreds were among the mixtures tested as part of the development process. The solid fiberglass mixture performed better at withstanding the wear and tear of an asphalt performance test.

For REGEN and Travero leadership who spoke at the opening, the new facility is a climate-friendly innovation for turbine operators and an expansion of operations in the city of Fairfax.

“Until now, wind turbine blades posed significant recycling challenges,” Travero President Lisha Coffey said. “A, they’re really big. And B, they’re made of all sorts of materials. Wood, foam, metals, an epoxy-laden fiberglass.”

With REGEN’s processing facility, the materials can be compacted into that shredded product, a departure from disposal methods currently used on old turbine blades, Coffey said.

Those include burning old blades to separate the epoxy covering from the blade or burying them in landfills, processes that “produced low-quality products and hazardous wastes.”

Facility anticipated to be up and running by next week

The processing plant, a roughly 500-foot-long, 90-foot-wide building, sits directly behind the company warehouse.

Inside, a maze of hoppers and conveyor belts wind through the structure. The Register toured the building, though no cellphones or cameras were permitted inside as the specifics of the process remain patent pending.

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At the beginning of the process, tons of small sections of the blades — which, in total, can stretch hundreds of feet long — are inserted into the hopper system and processed through multiple stretches of conveyor belts and filtered out at various waypoints based on size.

The facility also utilizes a vent-like system to prevent as much of the itchy shredded fiberglass from entering the air at any given time. That vent sucks out the fiberglass dust and is key in producing the fiberglass powder substance.

Each turbine blade is different, varying in size between three and 10 tons, meaning the facility’s per-blade processing power per hour will vary by blade and by day. Out-of-date blades will be continuously fed into the system throughout the facility’s one daily shift, staffed by approximately eight employees.

In a given year operating just a single shift, REGEN anticipates processing over 30,000 tons of blades at the Fairfax facility. The company said in a release that future expansion of this facility to accommodate additional processing demand is possible.

REGEN already has a recycling facility in Des Moines that repurposes blade manufacturing scrap metal and a facility in Lubbock, Texas, aimed at turbines in the southern United States.

Full processing at the Fairfax facility is expected to begin within the next week.

Ryan Hansen covers local government and crime for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. He can be reached at rhansen@press-citizen.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @ryanhansen01.