A 30 foot wind turbine blade built with a bio-based resin instead of standard epoxy was fully broken down in six hours inside a heated methanol reactor. The glass and carbon fibers came out clean and strong enough to reuse in new composite parts, which shredding cannot deliver. The resin, a polyester covalent adaptable network called PECAN, is made from plant sugars and is designed to hold up in service but dissolve under specific conditions. The prototype was made with the same infusion, cure, and finishing steps used on commercial blades, so the manufacturing process does not need to change. Commercial blades are much larger, and scaling the reactor to handle them is still an open problem. The research was published in Science and points to a way to keep thousands of retired blades out of landfills while preserving the value of the embedded fibers.
