(Radio Iowa) – A company based in central Iowa has found a way to recycle the giant blades from wind turbines, using their ground up parts when making concrete traffic barriers that are popular around construction sites. Nick Wylie, founder of Renewablade, headquartered in the Des Moines suburb of Bondurant, says they have a growing list of clients who want the ten-foot-long barriers, which weigh about 33-hundred pounds each. “We’re significantly cheaper than what a DOT-certified barrier would be with the recycled material we have in ours,” Wylie says. “A normal ‘jersey’ barrier with the DOT would be around $1,200 to $1,500 a piece, and our ten-footers, we actually sell them for $500 a piece.”

Wind turbine blades are made of things like fiberglass, balsa wood, resin, foam, and steel. The average blade is 116 feet long, though some approach 200 feet, and Iowa is one of the nation’s top producers of energy from wind turbines. Wylie says they’re never lacking for raw materials. “There’s pretty much an endless supply,” Wylie says. “We’re getting a fair amount every year and we’ve been recycling them. We’ve taken blades in from Maine and we’ve taken blades in from Washington, so there’s an awful lot.”

Renewablade can go to the site where a turbine is being retired and cut the blades into sections and haul them away, or customers bring in blade sections to recycle, for a tipping fee. The blade parts are shredded and combined into a ready-mix concrete blend, for a product Wylie says is 30-percent lighter than traditional concrete. “From what we know, we’re the only people that really have an end game for them,” Wylie says. “There’s a few other people that are bringing them in and shredding them, but nobody has a finished product that we know of, where we actually can see it all the way to a new product.”

In addition to the barriers, the company also makes landscaping blocks for retaining walls and other large-scale concrete construction products.