Building and erecting wind turbines requires hundreds of tons of materials — steel, concrete, fiberglass, copper, and more exotic stuff like neodymium and dysprosium used in permanent magnets.
In the case of wind and solar power, those emissions are nearly all front-loaded.
More specifically, they figure that wind turbines average just 11 grams of CO2 emission per kilowatthour of electricity generated.
The carbon footprint of such monsters could get as low as 6 g/kwh.
Instead of burning metallurgical coal to fire a traditional blast furnace to reduce iron ore into pig iron, they will use green hydrogen electrolyzed via renewable power.
In Italy a company called Sasil aims to recycle 3,500 tons of old solar panels a year, while Veolia in France intends to increase the capacity of its panel recycling to 4,000 tons a year.
Those blades, made of carbon fiber and fiberglass composites held together with plastics, are tougher to recycle.