A pale grey wall holds back a parking lot near downtown Des Moines, and most people who walk past it never give it a second look.
What they cannot see is the shredded fiberglass packed inside every block.
Material equal to three retired blades went into that wall.
Blades that size usually end in a landfill trench, cut into sections and buried.
So what does ground up blade material actually do inside a concrete block?
What fiberglass does inside concrete
Turbine blades are mostly fiberglass, with resin and internal supports inside. Once cut down and ground, the material can be added to concrete in large amounts, and the glass strands run through the mix the way fibers do in any fiber reinforced concrete, holding the material together rather than adding hardness.
“The fiberglass pieces in the concrete, they hold it together extremely well,” Nick Wylie told Des Moines station WHO 13, adding that the blocks may not be as hard as regular concrete but hold together well.
That grip explains the commercial appeal. Lighter barriers are cheaper to truck and easier to handle on site, and 30 percent lighter than traditional concrete means real savings on every delivery. Cost matters too: “We’re significantly cheaper than what a DOT-certified barrier would be,” Wylie has said of the recycled product.
Three blades, one wall, one parking lot
Three wind turbine blades sit ground up inside the concrete blocks of a new retaining wall at a credit union in downtown Des Moines. The blocks look like any other grey wall from the street, with no outward sign of what they hold, and the wall was installed by local construction partner Iowa Contracting.
The math inside them is striking. Every blade that once turned above an Iowa field now fits inside a structure a person can walk past in three strides, and blades from one whole turbine were repurposed in a single small parking lot wall.
The company makes three main products: retaining wall blocks like those used at the credit union, commercial highway barriers, and larger barriers used to bunker agricultural materials. The traffic barriers run ten feet long and weigh roughly 3,300 pounds each.
Where the blades come from, and why transport is the hard part
Blades can stretch about 200 feet and do not fit landfills or standard waste streams with ease. At that length, roughly the wingspan of a Boeing 747, transportation is difficult and expensive, which is a large part of why so many have simply been buried.
Headquartered in Bondurant with its processing operation in Earlham, the company has processed blades from as far away as Washington and Maine, though the economics work best nearer home. It also handled blades damaged in the 2024 tornado that struck Greenfield, Iowa, leaving behind a tangle of composite material with few outlets. When a blade goes out of commission, crews cut it into chunks on site, haul the pieces to the facility and shred them for the concrete mixture.
Production runs during the warmer months, which means output is seasonal and must be planned around local construction schedules.
The one thing the barriers still cannot do
There is an honest limit to this story. As founder Brian Meng told the Iowa Capital Dispatch, “We’re not going to be building any superhighways with it, yet.” Skyscrapers are out as well, he said, but non structural precast concrete is a good fit. That candor matters, because blade concrete is not a universal replacement for conventional material.
The barriers are not DOT certified, but they are useful for general contractors and localized construction projects. They can hold a retaining wall, separate lanes on a work site and protect equipment in temporary installations, which is where current customers are.
The supply side is not in doubt. Iowa was the second largest wind power producer in the country after Texas, and in 2024, wind turbines generated 63 percent of Iowa’s electricity, the highest wind power share for any state, per federal energy data. Each retiring turbine carries three blades that need somewhere to go.
What comes next for the blades already waiting
Output runs in the hundreds of blades each year, with ambitions to scale into the thousands. Meng said the challenge is not only sourcing the blades but also ensuring demand for the resulting concrete products, since concrete does not travel well and production must align with local markets.
That is the quieter constraint on blade fiberglass in concrete: a shredder can get through more blade than a nearby construction market wants to buy. Still, each block sold helps pay for the next pickup, which landfill burial never does.
“This wall shows what’s possible when we think differently about waste,” Meng said in announcing the project. Other efforts are testing recycled materials in energy infrastructure, and for now a plain grey wall near downtown Des Moines is one of the first visible results of that thinking.
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