Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Plaswire’s Blade Recycling Breakthrough

Andrew Billingsly, CEO at Plaswire, joins to discuss how the company recycles wind turbine blades into construction materials, timber replacements, and utility products. Plus carbon fiber recovery, zero-dust cutting technology, and plans to license blueprint factories worldwide.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Andrew Billingsly: Exactly.

Allen Hall: Are we good?

Andrew Billingsly: I’m truly impressed with this great operation you’ve got. You really moved this forward, isn’t it? That’s great. We try. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Yeah, we try. We’re not

Andrew Billingsly: trying. You do.

Allen Hall: So I, I will put an intro to this episode when we get back to the states. So I’m just gonna say, Andrew, welcome to the show.

And then we will start talking.

Andrew Billingsly: Where do I look

Allen Hall: here?

Andrew Billingsly: Right? Just, just here.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Don’t worry about those. We’ll figure that out later. That’s,

Andrew Billingsly: yeah. A bit of AI in that. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Andrew Billingsly: And you’ll see as well. Andrew, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Alan. Joe, really great pleasure to be here today.

Allen Hall: So we’re here to learn about PLA wire and all the great things you’re doing in Northern Ireland because you’re involved in a lot of recycling efforts in wind, outside of wind.

You’re doing very novel things, which I think the world needs to hear about. Let’s just back up a minute, because not everybody. And particularly [00:01:00]in North America has heard of PLA wire, even though you, you’re all over LinkedIn. What does PLA wire do? What is this basic fundamental of PLA wire?

Andrew Billingsly: Basically, we’re a processor of polymers.

Okay?

Andrew Billingsly: So that’s how we see ourselves, that’s how we frame ourselves. We’re a polymer processor with a waste management license. Uh,

Joel Saxum: I think the important thing here, and this is why I wanted to have this conversation, you and I have been talking in the background for a few years, is. The rhetoric around a lot of the world is we have this problem with recycling blades.

We can’t figure it out. Nobody’s got any solutions. Um, and if they do, it’s very agricultural as we say, right? They’re just grinding them up, using ’em in this, that, and what I tell people is like, no, no, you’re incorrect here. There are people doing this. There is, there is solutions out there. It just needs to be, we need, we need to talk about it.

We need to put it out there.

Andrew Billingsly: Absolutely. Uh, I fight very hard to tell the true story. Of course, there’s a [00:02:00] lot of greenwashing in every sector of every industry in the world, and those who do it right have to defend themselves. I mean, unfortunately, that’s what we have to do. Fortunately, mostly we’re able to do that if we work hard at it.

For us, we do not have a problem in general, dealing with wind farm waste. Wind farm waste is for us blades. Because we’ve taken a pragmatic approach to it. We have to look at how we deal with any waste coming into our, uh, process to ensure it’s environmentally handled, that it’s handled correctly, environmentally, that it meets a price point so that whatever we do with it, we can sell that product, ensure that it’s sustainable in how we operate, and it’s fully circular.

So that’s how we’ve addressed wind blades. We were invited into the industry and we worked out what was needed in the industry. But [00:03:00] before we went all full on with it, we had to make sure we could make products that was saleable, that was usable, and could be utilized within the industry wherever possible.

But you thought outside of the box

Allen Hall: quite a bit because the way I think the wind turbine blade recycling efforts have gone is to say, well, we’ll, just like Joel was saying, we’ll just grind them up. You’re taking polymer outside of the wind blade world that you’ve been using in aerospace and other industries and saying the valuable part of the wind turbine blade is the fiber and the resin, whatever remains there.

If I combine that with other polymers, I can create products with a lifetime that can replace other more expensive items, metal items, cement items. That is the, the, the wisdom that went into what you have done. How did you come up with that?

Andrew Billingsly: I think I was born outta the box. Frankly. I’ve been told that several times.[00:04:00]

We’re a solution orientated company. Uh, I was talking recently to somebody about how we built our first factory in Northern Ireland that went up in 10 weeks. That’s 20,000 square feet. And because the pressure we were under, we had that factory erected and in operation in 10 weeks. And that’s just a fact.

That’s a recorded fact. And I looked back only two years later and said, heck, what did we do there? Yeah, because we had to do it. So we did it. Yeah. We looked at the problem with the wind blade and we thought, we’ve gotta get a good solution for this. And we’d done that years before with aviation. We were presented with the challenge to deal with plastics arising from the manufacturer’s seating.

Now the US produces all the plastics for that sector. It comes into Europe for manufacturing seats, a lot of it local to where our factory is, but nobody had a solution. I have to put my hands up now. I broke a few rules here. I filled two [00:05:00] barn up with this material chopped up and ready to sell, but I actually couldn’t sell it, but I knew there was a solution.

So I worked on that for perhaps 18 months and then it worked. And today we are the main, uh, processor of this plastic that comes out of aircraft seating manufacturing, possibly. We still are the only one doing that.

Allen Hall: So you actually take the plastics from the manufacturer of seating and there’s a lot of scrap that’s involved in that.

Andrew Billingsly: Yep.

Allen Hall: You take all that plastic waste, you bring it back into your facility, you recombine and pelletize it again so that it can be reused somewhere else.

Andrew Billingsly: Yes, that material goes into, uh, an extrusion process with another company now. Okay. Wow.

Joel Saxum: But, but that’s the same thing you’re doing in wind right now, right?

The making it circular, but you’re adding or you’re, you’re adding other second use plastics to it.

Andrew Billingsly: Yeah. So our outta the box thinking was looking back in 2018, how do we grow our business [00:06:00] because recycling plastics within the extrusion world and the injection molding world. What’s getting more internal companies getting better at dealing with their own waste and putting it back into the circuit.

So what’s the waste? Nobody wants. It’s the really mucky stuff. It’s this material that comes out of, for example, bio digesters that take the supermarket garbage, the yellow label food that people don’t buy because it’s really is in a bad state. And that goes for digestion and they pull outta those biodigester 10% plastic waste.

Hmm. That is a really difficult product to deal with. And not only that, you also find a similar volume of waste coming maybe 24 tons a day, in some cases, sometimes more from the municipal waste processing centers as well. All this waste plastic goes for incineration. Nobody knows how to economically recycle that.

So we took on that challenge and produced what we call [00:07:00] RX polymer, which is. Hm, going through pattern now. I got the number only yesterday incidentally for it. And, uh, this enables us then to combine plastics that would not normally combine. So think about polyethylene, polypropylene. Yeah, they mix, but then add in nylon, adding polyester.

PET, add in styrene, adding up to 8%, uh, PVC materials. It’s an unknown for a polymer engineer, but we did that. And we cooperated with the university in Ireland to prove it. Uh, this is the technology Uni University in Shannon, and we still have an extremely good relationship with them. So we have this polymer.

Along comes COVID, we worked with it. We did the deep dive. We went out to find out could we make product with it, could we make a product people wanted, and could we sell that product because what’s the point otherwise? And then after COVID. [00:08:00] We went out into the market, met with aviation, had a very substantial and transformative almost meeting with Paul Bella, director at Boeing.

So by the end of the year we’d worked out along with some discussions with Air Airbus and with Tarmac Aero serve, how we could help them with their composite wastes as part of our RX polymer January, 2023. We got sucked into a, into the wind sector.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Billingsly: January, 2023. We got sucked into the wind sector with a significant phone call from Ted.

We had a meeting and agreed to take their first blades. We went out bo more land and that was start of a journey.

Allen Hall: Okay. So it just calls you up and says, Andrew, I need you to start recycling our offshore, mostly offshore or all offshore blades.

Andrew Billingsly: These were initially on shore blades. On

Allen Hall: shore blades. Okay.

Andrew Billingsly: And they said, did we know how to do it? Could [00:09:00]we do it?

Allen Hall: Okay?

Andrew Billingsly: And we said, yes.

Allen Hall: You said that? Yes. Without really knowing if the answer is yes.

Andrew Billingsly: Yes.

Allen Hall: Okay. I, I think that one of the things, I’m gonna back up just for a minute here. One of the things about Northern Ireland that people in the states don’t really realize is plastics and ejection molding are a focal point for Northern Ireland.

Roy, which is the big plastic comb. Brush manufacturer is based in Northern Ireland, so there’s a tremendous amount of plastic knowledge, injection molding knowledge sitting right in the same area. So hearing your story just makes me think, yes, this all starts to make sense now that, that the whole region is a, uh, epicenter in it, so to speak, of how to think about plastics working with shorts and bombardier and all the now Airbus and Boeing.

Those people are brilliant and you’re cut off the same limb of the tree. Right. [00:10:00] Where are these products now being used? So you now you’re getting blade from Wared and you, well, let’s talk first.

Andrew Billingsly: You have other customers besides Wared now you have some big names there. Oh, absolutely. So we do work with Airbus.

We do work with Boeing on the aviation side, but we’re talking wind today. Uh, so we have Sted, we work with Eola, Scottish Power Renewables, work with GE Verona. RWE uh, a host of them actually just goes on and on, you know, and it’s very important to serve these companies as best we can. Uh, we’ve recently started working with EDF and taking first fleets from a lot of these first fleets of blades from these companies.

We have a contract with BNM, which is in partnership with Ocean Wind for the future. BNM is B and Owner one of those great stories of a dirty company in the sense of producing. Fuel for, uh, households from Pete, which is extremely smoky and so forth, transforming to being the best [00:11:00] when it comes to, uh, renewables in Ireland.

Wow. Wow. Yeah,

Joel Saxum: I didn’t even know you could do that. Make fuel out of Pete. I just knew you made whiskey out of it.

My knowledge is not as good as your, your knowledge. Uh, but so questions for you. Then you have all these other customers coming in. You’re bringing in plastics from other areas and other sectors. How many right now as it sits, how many wind blades can you guys run through, you think? What does a yearly put throughput look like?

So

Andrew Billingsly: when we get to capacity as we grow the business, we’ll be able to process up to 11,000 tons of blades on our site.

Joel Saxum: Okay.

Andrew Billingsly: Whoa. Which is a good size capacity. Yeah. Uh, far, far in excess of what we expected, but that was to do with development. We moved from putting 10% blade into our finished product to 30%.

Joel Saxum: Yeah.

Andrew Billingsly: It was a big step. We achieved that in March this year, and it was just a. Happy days. And,

Joel Saxum: and when we talk product, right, we’re talking the RX polymer, but what is the end product? What can that be used for?

Andrew Billingsly: So the end product, uh, we can directly [00:12:00] replace virgin plastics in certain situations in the construction industry.

Things like protection board, shuttering board and that type of thing. For, uh, precast concrete, there’s a lot of precast concrete products are manufactured because it’s easy to do with, uh, concrete and to use virgin plastics. It’s just not even thought of doing that. But with our RX polymer and the combination of a fiber base in it, we can produce precast concrete products, which outperform concrete versions.

We’ve now got a polymer version, which won’t crack through temperature, variation through vibration, through wet and dry cycling, that type of thing. Wow. It’s kind of no brainer in a sense. And then on the timber replacement,

Joel Saxum: scour protection, offshore wind.

Allen Hall: There’s certain, well being in Northern Ireland, there’s a lot of wind and rain and sea and all the above.

Oh yeah. It’s

Andrew Billingsly: plenty of all of those. There it is. Definitely. It’s just wet and a bit like Glasgow, plenty of rain, you [00:13:00] know, and or Seattle’s not so different actually. It’s sure. Very similar. It could be quite similar. Yeah. So, and timber replacement is a big thing because the supply of timber cannot meet demand.

Yeah. To try and accelerate the supply of timber. They accelerate the growth of the trees using hydrocarbons in the form of fertilizers. And it’s not really gonna go anywhere in the right way. But to be able to put out product now, which outperforms timber for the utilities is a logical step for us. And that’s what we’ve done.

Producing poles and posts, which are fiber reinforced, which outperformed timber for the utility companies. Just one design by one utility in the UK consumes 33,000 tons a year. It is madness. I know. But we can offer them a product which lasts a minimum of 30 years certified versus a timber version that because of the regulations regarding, uh, preservatives, it could only last between eight and 10 years.

Allen Hall: Oh, [00:14:00] sure. Well that makes a lot of sense. So you’ve, you’ve broken through the barrier of blade recycling into now almost consumer products, industrial products, construction products. Uh. What’s next? Where are you going next? You gonna start making airplanes and cars out of this material or

Andrew Billingsly: no? That I fell outta the box actually bumping my head so I can’t go any further.

Um, where do we go from this Look, we are always going to be looking to be better at what we do, so on the blade side, we have great cutting technology that everybody should look at and consider doing something at least similar. So no dust. Very important, and we are moving sometime next year. We haven’t got a date for this yet, where we’ll have a robotic cutting system with absolutely no ze, no dust at all.

Zero dust. That’s amazing. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: That’s a, that is a, that’s a big problem in like the states for plane recycling. The, the [00:15:00] regulations around dust and um, and how close you can be to residential areas and siding and all those kind of things.

Andrew Billingsly: If you’re making dust and it’s landing on the ground, it’s gonna be there forever.

So don’t make it.

Joel Saxum: There you go.

Andrew Billingsly: That’s the fact. Um, the idea of the robotics is also to be able to recover the carbon fiber, stay in the center of the blade.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. ‘

Andrew Billingsly: cause carbon fiber is heading towards being a shortage product. And we have the opportunity to preserve that and re reuse that product effectively.

If you see the carbon fiber in a blade and the big blades, 70 meters and so forth, you go, wow, it’s pencil thickness. You don’t want to see that getting weight.

Allen Hall: Right.

Andrew Billingsly: So using expensive

Allen Hall: too. Yeah.

Andrew Billingsly: Using, yeah, it’s very expensive. Get more so, you know, we are using carbon fiber for novelty. Things like fass in cars and so forth, right.

Or wrongs and other matter. But it’s utilizing a product that needs to be going into better applications. No doubt about it. So we’re going in that way to improve the cutting technology. And then [00:16:00] another area is a recyclable blade. So we are talking with the developers of the original recyclable Blade technology about should we be working with them to operate a facility to enable that future technology to become operable.

It’s okay to sell the product, but are you recycling it afterwards?

Allen Hall: Right. Can you break it down and get the fiber out of it? Yeah.

Andrew Billingsly: So they’re early discussions and we’d like to progress those over time and achieve a success for everybody there.

Joel Saxum: So Audi, the, the, the facility in Ireland, you’re doing a lot of process improvement.

You’re getting better and better and better, but you can, you can process a certain amount of tons there per year. Are you looking at mainland Europe, US South America? Are you, are you moving around yet or,

Andrew Billingsly: yeah. You are a mind reader, aren’t you? I think. Come on now. Look. So we are working with the crown estate.

I don’t know, how do you know about the crown estate? Very, uh, influential party, uh, regarding offshore wind [00:17:00] and onshore wind. Okay. And we are working on a feasibility study with them to create a blueprint factory and put up a new facility in the United Kingdom in Scotland. Where we put, that is still under negotiation at the moment because it depends whether or not there’s gonna be a blade manufacturing facility there.

Blade manufacturing waste has to be dealt with. Oh yes, it has to. And it’s been ignored and it has to be dealt with and we align to be doing that.

Allen Hall: So you would set up shop next door to the blade manufacturing facility.

Andrew Billingsly: That’s the optimal thing to do.

Allen Hall: Sure it

is.

Andrew Billingsly: Yep. And there’s various discussions taking place with more than one manufacturer about putting a facility into Scotland, but I’m not privy to discuss those things.

And then in England, working with a consortium to put up a facility there which will support the offshore wind as it decommissions.

Allen Hall: Oh sure. Wow. See, we have a lot of plans. Yeah. For

Andrew Billingsly: the future. Yeah. And we real, we will realize them. Uh, the beauty of all of this [00:18:00] is the carbon saving because we are diverting products away from incineration.

And if you take a blade and put into cement kilt, you’re still producing CO2.

Allen Hall: Sure. It

Andrew Billingsly: has to. And we know that’s not a long term solution because when you melt glass, glass sinks to the bottom of the furnace and one by one cement kiln say, we’ve had enough of this and it seems to affect the refractory bricks as well.

Which causes deterioration and another cost for the cement companies. So we can prevent between 2.7 and 2.9 tons of CO2 production. For every ton of waste we divert from this generation.

Allen Hall: Wow. That’s tremendous.

Andrew Billingsly: That’s tremendous. Yeah. And then the products we replace in the market, the virgin plastics, the precast concrete replacements, the, the timber replacements all have high carbon numbers, but now that’s finished.

Right. Yeah. So we can net up to 1.7 tons of CO2 offset saving, [00:19:00]whatever way you want to put it, for every time we process. That’s quite fantastic. Well, now we never knew these numbers. As I say, we were pulled into this industry and then we started to look at what are we doing here? And whoa, we didn’t realize.

Joel Saxum: Fantastic.

Allen Hall: Well, for, for everybody who’s listening today that deals with blades and that, that’s a vast majority of our relationship has to do with blades somewhat during their life cycle. And I’m wondering what the next generation of recycling actually looks like. It’s PLA wire and they need to get a hold of you, Andrew.

How would they do that? To learn more?

Andrew Billingsly: Yes. Well, we are talking with potential partners. Our way to grow is really through a licensing system.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Andrew Billingsly: A reasonable licensing system. So our intention is to put out this blueprint factory, which can be manipulated to suit the market. It can be smaller, it can be larger.

The equipment for it is standard. It’s a lot of standard machines joined together in a particular way. The keys and the process and so forth. [00:20:00] So for example, we can offer a blueprint to a company and they equip it with US machinery or Mexican machinery or whatever, machinery. Sure. Yep. So they can control the cost of that.

So we sell that design, sell them the engineering work to it. Work with ’em on their market surveys in advance to make sure they’re not going into a world that’s not gonna produce revenue for them. Everything has to be profitable. Assure them of the markets for the finished products, and then work on a license fee with them.

Allen Hall: Okay. And they can do that by going to the website PLA wire. You can just Google PLAs Wire,

Andrew Billingsly: Google. Yeah. So you’ll find me at andrew@plaswire.com, which is easy enough for everybody, I believe. Yeah.

Allen Hall: P-L-A-S-W-I-R-E. Dot com.

Andrew Billingsly: That’s correct, Alan. Yeah. Thank you.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a really interesting website and Andrew, I’m really glad we had the time to sit down and to discuss your business because it is fascinating.

It’s next generation on recycling, and it’s good to spread the word a little bit. So thank you for [00:21:00] joining us today,

Andrew Billingsly: Alan. Joel. It’s been really good for me too. It. I’m so pleased to be able to do this. Yes. And you know what you want the most fantastic podcast to listen to, I have to tell you that. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Well we need to have Yon Moore. So

Andrew Billingsly: yeah, I’ll be very happy and love to be able to share our progress as we develop and just, we are always gonna be a changing organization, but always for the better. And you’re gonna understand, I guess we’re quite passionate about what we do.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Andrew Billingsly: Yeah.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Congratulations and thank you for joining us.

Andrew Billingsly: Thank you very much. Yep. Perfect. Cool. Wonderful. Wow. So easy now.

Plaswire’s Blade Recycling Breakthrough

Regarding the question at left, I’m not sure.  Maybe “Stupidity?”

If humankind is forced to migrate to Mars because it’s too stupid to fix the catastrophes it’s created here on Earth, and also stupid enough to believe that taking our criminal insanity to another planet will effectively address our problems, I can’t think of a better name.

Migrating Human Civilization to Mars

An essential part of being a Republican congressperson is being able to convince your constituents of things that are obviously untrue.

It is true that the United States experiences voter fraud, though studies assess it at a miniscule percentage of 1%.  But it’s virtually never committed by illegal aliens, since they don’t have the credentials to register to vote in any of our 50 states.

The defining characteristic of a successful GOP representative is his capacity to lie to morons.

Lying about Voter Fraud–Gotta Hand it to This Guy