Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas

About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives in 2017, she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades—between 150 and 200 feet in length and mostly made of composite materials such as fiberglass with a binding resin—kept coming. Each was cut into thirds, with each segment longer than a school bus. Thousands arrived over several years, eventually blanketing more than thirty acres.  Stagnant pools of water inside the blades breed swarms of mosquitos. Matt Jackson has other concerns. The piles create shaded nooks and crannies. “It’s just a big rattlesnake farm,” he said… Sweetwater isn’t the only place Global Fiberglass has stockpiled blades. It has a total of 1,300 in Newton, Iowa, and two other cities in that state, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. After an investigation, the agency concluded in 2021 there was no recycling going on, nor was any likely to happen. It declared the company to be running an unpermitted dump.