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Posts mislead on wind turbine erosion waste
Social media users have claimed that wind turbines shed hundreds of kilos of toxic particles due to erosion, contaminating the environment and the food supply. But experts told AFP the posts exaggerate the phenomenon, which has a negligible effect on ecosystems compared to pollution from sectors such as the textile and automotive industries .
"I didnt know that wind turbines lose hundreds of kilos of carbon microfibers during their operation over the years (due to abrasion at the wing edges)," says a May 24, 2024 post with thousands of shares on Facebook. Leon Mishnaevsky Jr, a senior scientist in the Department of Wind and Energy Systems at the Technical University of Denmark (archived here), said June 7 that the post caption "is wrong and misleading." Sanjay Raja Arwade, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (archived here), said June 6, 2024 that wind turbine erosion "will have a negligible contribution to global discharge of plastics and solid waste into the oceans."
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