Renewable sources and recycling: several companies are working on “closing the circle”

There are about 700 million tons of CO2 that good recycling practices (both private citizens and companies) avoid ending up in the atmosphere and, according to the Global Recycling Foundation, the quantity is destined to exceed one billion tonnes by 2030.

Recycling is not alone a great way to avoid making global warming worsebut also to safeguard the limited (albeit renewable) resources of our planet, giving new life to already used products.

In a constantly evolving context – where every day new ways are found and new machinery is invented to perfect the procedures for recovering and reusing raw materials – a leading role is played by renewable sources.

The plants used in the green energy sector have useful lives ranging – on average – from 20 to 35 years and there are many people who – rightly or wrongly – they fear images of endless landfills full of solar panels, turbines and wind turbines.

Net of the fact that yes, in a few decades these materials will reach retirement, they are strategies are already in place to recycle the precious componentsmaking that apocalyptic image unlikely.

Enel Green Power (EGP), a company linked to Enel and dedicated solely to renewables – in particular to solar panels, as we have illustrated in these articles (link, link) – already developed its own circularity measurement model in 2015, the CirculAbility Model. The company has made it public, sharing it with institutions and research bodies.

The guidelines of the handbook are as simple as they are concrete:

• Recover as much raw materials as possible from disused photovoltaic and wind farms;
• Increase battery recovery rates;
• Maximize the quality of the recovered material and minimize the volume of waste;

The result is the reduction of costs and environmental impacts and the generation of value.

Specifically, EGP’s wind recycling program – which according to the University of Cambridge by 2050 it will have produced over 43 million tons of waste between turbines, blades and towers – provides for the recovery of approx 85% of the original materials.

In practice, EGP is actively participating in the project Wind New Life for the construction, in the Compostilla complex (Spain), of a plant for the collection and treatment of discarded blades capable of recovering up to 6000 tons of glass and carbon fiber per year.

The recovered materials will become high-value components for construction, sanitary products and furniture.

Another possible way is the integration of recovered materials in the projects developed by Energy Vault, the Swiss startup we talked about in this article.

The fibrous material used in wind power supplies the Swiss company’s blocks with greater stability and sturdiness.

Finally, remaining from the point of view of end-to-end sustainability of wind generation, there is the design of the turbines and their components following the circularity by design, using new and less impactful materials.

In this context, EGP has started partnerships with two startups: the Swedish modvion and the Scottish ACT Blade.

The first produces wooden modular towerswhich simplify the logistics and installation of taller towers, the second blades entirely covered in fabric which, for the same mass, allow to reach greater lengths compared to current materials, increasing the production of wind farms.

The solar sector also has a lot to offer: according to IRENA estimates, by 2050 there will be between 60 – 78 million tons of panels and modules to be disposed ofwhile generating both a staggering pile of waste is worth more than $15 billion.

It’s up to us to decide what we want to have.

According to Enel Green Power some components are very simple to recycle (for example glass) while others require more invasive processeswhich allow for the efficient recovery of materials such as silicon, phosphorus, indium, silver and copper.

According to the company, the first step in creating a virtuous circle within the solar industry is request that all modules have EPD certification (Environmental Product Declaration), an ecological label in all respects, which estimates the environmental impacts and recyclability of products and services.

Moreover, all purchased inverters must have certificates sustainability in terms of emissions (in accordance with ISO 14046 standards) and carbon footprint (in accordance with ISO 14067 standards).

Then there is the European project Photoramaborn in 2021 with the aim of achieving full circularity in the supply chainthrough a reliable recycling system to recover and put secondary materials back on the market as well rarer and more difficult to transform.

In the end, domestic storage batterieswho walk side by side with renewables.

It is estimated that by 2030, the Italian energy system alone will have produced around 60,000 tonnes of used batteries every year.

Also in this case, it is waste of great valuewhich need to a rigorous approach oriented towards their recovery and enhancement right from the design and creation phase.

In this field, EGP is becoming the spokesperson for specific sustainability indicatorsin order to stimulate the entire supply chain to adopt a circular approach.

Parallel to the discussion of domestic storage batteries there is that of batteries for electric cars: in this case, the retirement of the cells from use in cars does not coincide with their end of life.

In fact, the battery packs of electric vehicles are successfully reused as backup systems home storageas demonstrated by the EGP pilot project Second Life in Melilla (Spain), in which discarded trucking batteries are integrated and reused in a new energy storage system which stabilizes the city’s electricity grid.

In case car batteries cannot be used in any way since 2021 precise procedures have been put in place for the recycling of their components, by Volkswagen.

The German company, which years ago started moving into the zero-emission mobility sector, has timely thought of the best way to take care of the batteries installed on your cars, preventing them from becoming waste.

At the Salzgitter site, two years ago, the first plant in the entire group for the recycling of high-voltage car batteries went into operationrecovering precious raw materials such as lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt.

“Our goal is to create our own cycle, in which we recover more than 90 percent of our batteries” said Thomas Tiedje, head of technical planning at Volkswagen Group Components, adding: “We do not want to leave any stage of the process to others; instead we prefer to qualify our employees and thus prepare them for the future”.

The group shared some details and steps of the process on their own website.