By Steven Lindsay
The first in a series of blogs about the full breadth of Reblade's wind industry services, but first an introduction to this stack of planks and explain why we are so proud of it.
Everyone in the wind sector knows blades can be tough to manage. So as the first generation of commercial wind farms reach the end of their working life, the industry has been crying out for an environmentally sustainable, but scalable, solution.
These planks represent a viable, scalable and cost-effective solution to that challenge.
In the early days of our business, I got a bit weary of people declaring “you can’t cover the country in blade bus shelters, EV roofs and benches!”
Of course, we knew that, but to solve any challenge of this magnitude, you have to start somewhere, so we started with high-impact infrastructure.
We still design, manufacture and install items as and when clients approach us with an idea for something, but we’ve also been working with composites scientists and materials experts.
Our goal was a scalable process that would deal with blade waste in a sustainable way while creating a product for which there would be a viable market. We knew that for any solution to be viable, it would need to result in an adaptable product that can be sold across multiple sectors.
BladeBoard® is the result of that ambition.
It's a composite plank manufactured from shredded decommissioned wind turbine blades, with 45–50% recycled blade content, an industry-leading figure. It comes with a full life cycle assessment that demonstrates we save around 480kg of C02 equivalent per tonne of BladeBoard® produced.
It is a scalable, commercially viable product, and it’s ready now.
BladeBoard® was engineered from a commercial starting point, designed to compete on performance and price, not just on its environmental credentials.
Currently, it’s available in two different plank sizes but the beauty of our approach is that we can make almost anything from the material, and all of it is UV and weather proof and infinitely traceable and recyclable.
We built Reblade from inside the wind industry, with deep understanding of what wind farm operators actually need when a site reaches end of life.
That knowledge has shaped every decision we made, and it's why what started as a blade focused start-up has grown into a full-service partner for some of the biggest names in the sector.
BladeBoard® demonstrates what's possible when you do the hard graft of building real-world solutions from the ground up. But it’s only one part of a much bigger picture.
Over the next few weeks, I'll walk you through the rest of it, starting with our technical consultancy solutions.