Zack must have a solution for this

An interesting Blackout News report on a major unsolved problem for anyone inclined to pretend that old wind turbine blades can be recycled. They can't - that's the problem. 

As far as we can tell from their speeches and legislation, the keenest minds in European governments have been unaware of this intractable problem for a long time, unlike less enlightened folk who have known about it for years. This tells us something, but it's merely a repeat, something we already know.


Recycling of old rotor blades unsolved: Up to 75,000 tons of GRP waste per year

Berlin – In Germany, the disposal problem of old rotor blades is growing because more and more wind turbines from the expansion years after 2000 are reaching the end of their life. because large parts of the old stock were not designed for a high-quality material cycle. The German government expects 326,000 to 430,000 tonnes of waste from pure GRP sheets by 2040. In individual years, up to 75,000 tons of GRP waste can be generated. In addition, there are up to 212,000 tons of sheets with GRP and CFRP components. These older composite components in particular can only be recycled at great expense.


The whole piece is well worth reading, partly because it's interesting and partly because we may as well assume that yet another subsidy is probably looming over the sustainability horizon, a recycling subsidy. 

The subsidy suspicion arises quite naturally because there are possible ways to recycle, or at least dispose of blades currently reaching the end of their useful lives. Not that their lives have been useful in any meaningful sense beyond political virtue-signalling, but that's another issue.

Crushing and incineration are no substitute for a material cycle

Mechanical processes crush old leaves into flakes, granules or powder. However, the original fibres are not retained in a high-quality form. The cement industry can use crushed material as fuel and mineral substitute for raw materials. Although this reduces the amount to be disposed of, it does not produce new equivalent glass fibers. In Germany, simple landfilling is also largely ruled out, which is why efficient recycling routes are absolutely necessary.

A study by the University of Strathclyde examines a pilot plant with 1,000 kilograms of rotor blade material per day and 365,000 kilograms per year. This results in around 247,100 kilograms of recycled glass fibres per year. The gross costs on a pilot scale are around €5.30 per kilogram of recycled glass fibre. New glass fibers, on the other hand, are estimated by the study at the equivalent of around €1.98 per kilogram. This means that the recovered optical fiber costs more than two and a half times as much as new material in pilot operation. The CO₂ balance is also worse at first: Recycled glass fiber causes 2.24 kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram, while new glass fiber causes 1.90 kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram.

Those bootlicking apologists for trivial interventions

Towards the end of August, Christopher Snowdon wrote a most interesting Critic piece on the erosion of small freedoms and the corresponding accumulation of small annoyances. 

This is one of the problems of course, those small annoyances accumulate. Over time they become a drag on daily life until we adapt, while knowing we shouldn't have to adapt to preposterous official intrusions.   

In defence of small freedoms

Bootlicking apologists should stop defending government intervention on the grounds of its supposed triviality

As laws become more preposterous and governments intrude ever further into the private lives of individuals, you might expect the public to revolt. Instead, the growing state has given rise to a strange breed of bootlicking gimps who go out of their way to bat for the government.

The journalist Tom Harwood was in Washington D.C. this week and tweeted a video of himself unscrewing the cap from a bottle of Coke with the caption “Sweet land of liberty”. The point was that he was able to fully remove the plastic cap without violently twisting and tugging its tether — a freedom that has been denied to residents of the EU since 2024 thanks to Article 6 of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.

At this point, Snowdon brings in the bootlickers who defend each little pointless burden as if nothing much is being demanded of us. We should suck it up is their airy message, telling us we're making a fuss about nothing. 

The whole piece is well worth reading because as we know too well, another example could pop up tomorrow.

But minor inconveniences soon add up. I wrote last week about the government’s plan to put vape products behind shutters in shops. The Impact Assessment rather conservatively assumes that this will lead to transaction times taking two seconds longer. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you add it all up it amounts to a cost of £43 million on retailers. It has been estimated that Europeans waste a total of 575 million hours per year clicking on cookie consent buttons which, when monetised, amounts to €14.3 billion. Those who defend GDPR don’t seem to mind this, although they suddenly find that their time is incredibly precious when the non-EU queue is longer than the EU queue at passport control. It then becomes the turn of the eurosceptics to say “It’s only a queue, mate! What’s the big deal? You don’t mind queuing at the supermarket, do you?”

To put responsibility on the shoulders of a tamed man

John Caudwell: I backed Labour, but they haven’t kept their promises

We should be making it easier for entrepreneurs to invest, employ and expand. Instead Labour has given them more reasons to look elsewhere, writes John Caudwell...

Andy Burnham says he wants to be pro-business and I take him at his word. I want this government to succeed, and so do the founders who back this campaign, as for the benefit of the general population, we need to deliver growth.

The Budget on 28 October is the moment to show that. Get it right and the founders now weighing up their options will build their next companies here. Get it wrong and they will build them abroad, leaving Britain with fewer companies, weaker growth and fewer jobs in every part of the country.

 Andy Burnham says he wants to be pro-business and I take him at his word. A strange thing to say unless it is rhetorical and more challenge than expectation. At least as much hope as expectation perhaps. Yet it does suggest how far adrift we are economically. 

The political hunger for more taxation is out there in the open, along with ceaseless propaganda from the usual suspects. For Burnham to be pro-business, that tax hunger would have to remain unappeased which would be politically difficult. 

Even more difficult, would be the pro-business necessity to tackle what has become obvious tax plundering and cut it deeply enough to generate significant economic growth. 

Sounds unlikely. It would probably lead to a political storm before the growth, plus campaigns to undermine Burnham as Prime Minister. He knows all this of course, he comes across as a tamed politician, tamed by Labour and the tax and spend Establishment. Willingly tamed too, if his political history is any guide, which it almost certainly is. 

Many people expect more tax plundering on 28 October. As furtive as possible perhaps, but it's not an unreasonable expectation. Managing the machinery of government is difficult, so most professional politicians prefer to duck and dive. It's what they do best, the act they were tamed to perform.

You can do nothing if you are kept outside

An interesting conversation from the D.H. Lawrence novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The conversation is between Michaelis, a very successful Irish playwright, Sir Clifford Chatterley and Lady Constance "Connie" Chatterley. 

"Money!" he said. "Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose."

"But you've got to begin," said Clifford.

"Oh quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it."

"But could you have made money except by plays?" asked Clifford.

"Oh probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no question of that."

"And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?" asked Connie.

"There, exactly!" he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. "There's nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public, if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make them popular. It's not that. They just are, like the weather ... the sort that will have to be ... for the time being."

D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

A point we could make today is that our digital world no longer has an "outside" which is as clearly defined as it was a century ago.   

VW - Very Worried

Volkswagen to cut up to 50,000 jobs amid growing Chinese competition

Volkswagen Group is preparing to trim its vehicle range substantially while removing 50,000 roles under newly introduced corporate restructuring plans.

The company's Supervisory Board has ‘unanimously approved’ the new ‘Future Plan 2030’ strategy as it seeks to reduce expenditure in response to rising market rivalry from China.

Consequently, Volkswagen intends to contract its car model lineup by roughly 50 per cent. It also intends to ‘reduce its offering complexity’ – decreasing trim options and specifications – by about 75 per cent.

The carmaker will downsize its workforce by approximately 50,000 positions. As this step is ‘beyond existing programs’, previously planned job cuts will continue to be rolled out as they were scheduled.

Merely a casual observation, but round here we see lots of Chinese cars on the road, far more than we did a couple of years ago. 

Overhead the mynah birds are making a great to–do

Environment Secretary warns people to store food for weather emergencies

An unprecedented El Nino event is forecast to reach more than 3C in the coming months.

Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle has urged people to store supplies in case of extreme weather events.

An unprecedented El Nino event – when sea temperatures in tropical eastern Pacific rise 0.5C above the long-term average – is forecast to reach more than 3C in the coming months, making this year’s event “the largest since the 19th century”, according to the Met Office.

In England, in London, there are certain afternoons in winter when the clouds hang heavy and low and the light is so bleak that your heart sinks, but then you can look out of your window, and you see the coconut trees crowded upon the beach of a coral island. The strand is silvery and when you walk along in the sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it. Overhead the mynah birds are making a great to–do, and the surf beats ceaselessly against the reef. Those are the best journeys, the journeys that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your illusions.

W. Somerset Maugham – Honolulu (1921)

The growth we don't need

Jonathan Eida has a useful TPA piece on what seems like the inexorable growth of the Civil Service and the humongous liabilities which come with it. Depressing but worth reading as there is no obvious prospect of Andrew Burnham doing anything about it.


The true cost of the civil service is worse than you think

The waistband on the trousers of the civil service continues to stretch as the Whitehall blob expands year after year. The prime minister may come and go, but the appetite for a larger, more active state appears remarkably constant. Andy Burnham is no exception, with his “Number 10 North” proposal being just the latest pretext for another layer of bureaucracy.

Since the government began publishing comparable civil service workforce data in 2016, headcount has risen by a shocking 33.3 per cent.

Between March 2016 and March 2026, civil service employment increased by 139,485, from 418,340 to 557,825. In the last year alone, the number of civil servants rose by 8,165, or 1.5 per cent, from 549,660 in March 2025 to 557,825 in March 2026. That rate of growth was two and a half times the 0.6 per cent increase in total public sector headcount over the same period.