Blade Recycling with Media Sourcery and Everpoint Services

Larry Ketchersid, CEO of Media Sourcery discusses their partnership
with Everpoint Services to improve the recycling process for blades
and solar panels, proving the circular economy. Their method uses
innovative blockchain technology to create verifiable proof of
proper recycling. By implementing this tracking method, asset
owners can be certain their blades have been properly disposed of.
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! The recycling crisis for wind turbine blades
and solar panels demands better solutions as these materials pile
up without proper processing and documentation. This week we speak
with Larry Ketchersid, CEO of Media Sorcery, who's partnered with
Everpoint Services to tackle renewable waste recycling. Their
innovative blockchain technology creates verifiable proof that your
decommissioned assets actually reach proper recycling facilities,
not abandoned in fields or landfills. Stay tuned. Allen Hall:
Alright, Larry, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So
we met yesterday with Everpoint Services who is doing a quite a bit
of business at the minute doing solar panel recycling and wind
turbine blade recycling. Correct. And we've talked about it on the
podcast more recently about the efforts. To make sure that what
leaves the facility is actually [00:01:00] recycled. There is a
industry problem where blades leave a site and they get stacked up
in some farm somewhere or some disposal site and never get chewed
up or ground up and, and recycled properly. And it's a black eye on
the industry, right? Joel Saxum: Yeah. You get, uh, I mean, we. The
wind industry has detractors. We already know this. Right? And then
when you have something that's like that, especially wind turbine
blades, 'cause they're big, uh, and it's very visible, the problem
then exacerbates itself. Right? I mean it, like you said, black eye
on the industry. But even with that happening, we still haven't
gotten all the way to solving that problem that's, that's existing
there. But you guys are working on it. Larry Ketchersid: We are. We
are. We, we have a solution that we cut our teeth on with, uh,
tracking things like COVID-19 test kits. Okay. Right. So we, we
started proof of authenticity when, uh, we were in the healthcare
business. And during Covid we had a partner that became an importer
of, uh, COVID kits from Korea. And what [00:02:00] people didn't
realize is if you leave the Covid kits out of the freezer, the
efficacy goes down. So we had a automated workflow system that we
turned into a proof of authenticity for. Tracking Covid kits from
the manufacturer. So we put little, I mean this was four or five
years ago during the pandemic, we had these chemical barcodes that
were temperature sensitive, and we put 'em on the, on the covid
kits. So, and, and you had to scan 'em. So they weren't really
interactive sensors, but from point A to point B, you could scan
'em. Did the, the temperature go above a certain amount for a
certain period of time, which made 'em bad, yes or no? And then we
just track 'em all the way through. So it, it's very. Similar to
what we're trying to do with tracking, recycling. I mean, we use
this solution to track, uh, all sorts of things, but recycling is a
really obvious use case for it. So what we try to do is we, we, we
take an asset. So an asset can be a solar panel, it can be a pallet
of solar panels, it can [00:03:00] be a blade, it can be a tractor
trailer, full of blades, whatever the customer wants. And we take
as much of the evidence about an event and the life of that asset,
whether it's. Demolition for at the first part, transport for the
second part, and then grinding or recycling for the third part, and
then whatever comes after that. And, and we, we take all that
evidence, uh, put it on decentralized public ledger storage so that
it's there, um, maybe not forever in some cases, but it can be
forever in, in whichever cases we want. We hash all that
information. We put it on the blockchain so it's there forever. For
each one of those events, and then at the end we take that proof of
authenticity and we turn it into an NFT. If we think there's value
in it, because an NFT is a, a blockchain construct for a non
fungible token, so we can, we can save that as an NFT along with
all the metadata. So if there's value in that later, [00:04:00]
we'll come back to it and we'll have that NFT as a tradable entity.
And when I say value at later, I'm talking about potential
greenhouse gas emission savings for, for the way that we're doing
proof of recycling. Allen Hall: Okay. That was a lot. I'm sorry. I
wanna unwind that a little bit. Yep. So let's work on the process
first and I'll, we'll figure out the NFT part here in a second. So
the process is on a wind turbine, we take down the blades or take
down, typically take them to the cell down and a bunch of other
things. Yep. They're sitting on the ground. You come in and you
start tagging each one of these with an RFID, or is it something a
little more complicated than that? Larry Ketchersid: So we have
four or five different trackers that we use depending on what we're
tracking. So for wind turbine blades, we can use one of two. We've
got an industrial tracker. Uh, that does three different kinds of,
uh, of back haul, we call it. So it can do GPS, it can do something
called [00:05:00] Lower wan, which is long range wide area network.
Yep. Uh, it can use wifi if it sees wifi stations and, and that one
is industrial, we, we screw it in to the fiberglass blades on, on a
truck. That's, that's the first way that we did it. When we did,
uh, Candace Wood and I from Everpoint services did one of these.
2002. 2022. Um, what we have now are sticker trackers that have 3M
adhesive on the back. Uh, they're, they're very, very thin. Um, I
think, did I show you one yesterday? I think I showed you one
yesterday. I saw one. Allen Hall: Yes. Larry Ketchersid: And, and
we just, we can slap that on there. And we, we like using that
method because when that goes through the grinder. We know it's, we
know it's dead and it's, it's inexpensive enough that it, it's cost
effective to put it on each piece of a wind turbine blade. It's not
cost effective enough to put it on every solar panel, but you can
put it once they bound the solar panels together on a pallet, we,
we stick it in between the top one and the middle [00:06:00] one so
that the signal can still get out and when, when that one gets
ground up. We've already associated every serial number for the
pallet of solar panels to that serial number on that sticker
tracker. So we know once one of them's ground up, we assume the
whole pallet's ground up. Joel Saxum: That was the question I was
gonna ask was, and you kind of touched on it, was around the cost.
Yep. Right. So all of those things say Everpoint is gonna do a
service for someone. Is that built into the bid? Like the tracking
It is. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Larry Ketchersid: It is. And
you know, uh, the reason we work where Everpoint for a variety of
reasons. One, full disclosure, my company invested in Everpoint,
uh, way back in the day. Okay. 'cause we believed in what they were
doing. And the reason we believe in what they're doing is they,
they want to make sure that the, the stuff that they're taking
down, the demolition work that they're doing is going somewhere.
Right. Right. And, and they, you know, previously they would
contract with people and they, you know what you don't know, you
know, what people are doing with it. You guys mentioned it at the
beginning of the podcast. There's, [00:07:00] there's, there's a
lot of, uh, dump. Where, where stuff gets put and you know, it's,
it's just not, it's not the full circular economy that we're trying
to promote in our company and that Everpoint services are trying to
promote as well. Allen Hall: So now you have basically an air tag
on each of the blades or a pallet of solar panels. Correct. It may
be the simple way to think about it. Yep. And similar to air tags,
you can actually watch as the truck pulls the blade along or the
blade sections along. To where if ever it's Everpoint's gonna take
it to be ground up or whatever happens to it on the recycling side.
So not only do you identify it at this farm where it's been pulled
down from, now you're constantly tracking this piece of blade or
these sections of blade or this whole thing to its end of life. I,
I think that's where a lot of operators are concerned about is like
when it leaves my site, it kind of, I can't track it. I don't know
where [00:08:00] it's going anymore. Right, right. And I'm not
sure, as some OEMs have pointed out, I'm not sure where it ends up
at. 'cause I have no way of following. So unless I physically
follow this thing. I don't know. So as an operator working with
Everpoint, I can actually see that the blaze that are leaving my
site or the solar panels that are leaving my site, I can actually
see where they're going live, so to speak. Larry Ketchersid: That's
correct. That's correct. And we, you know. Cool. We, we put it on a
dashboard. Um, they can share it with whoever they want to, so you
can see them going. Um, we had 460 pallets from this last job that
we did, so the map gets a little busy, so you kind of have to
separate it out, but it's, it, it shows, it shows 'em going
everywhere and, you know, occasionally. It's not perfect. Um,
sticker tracker wouldn't put on. Right. One fell off. We had to
make some assumptions, but,