Wind Blade Recycling to See ‘Rapid Growth’ 

Developing the necessary infrastructure to recycle and manage decommissioned wind turbine blades will require significant investment over the coming decades but offers numerous potential upsides for the breakbulk industry, industry body AEE predicts.

With the development of wind turbine technology accelerating and the size of wind power projects growing ever larger, the need to decommission old wind farms is increasing, and with it the necessity to manage thousands of breakbulk components.

“In order to achieve a fully commercial blade recycling network at scale there are still multiple challenges in which the wind industry will work in the next few years,” Piluca Núñez, director of Asociación Empresarial Eólica told Breakbulk, noting that there is significant potential to cultivate recycling networks at the same time.

For breakbulk operators this is likely to be good news as, while the majority of wind farm components can be decommissioned on site, the blades themselves are likely to require specialist breakbulk handling and will likely see reuse for years to come.


Upscaling ‘Completely Viable’

With progress in much of the wind power technology often measured by the diameter of the latest turbine rotor blades, the race to longer sizes is driving obsolescence in older wind farms. To tackle this, major producers are now proposing the development of a blade recycling networks to handle old components. However, a number of differing technologies currently compete for dominance in the sector adding to uncertainty for stakeholders.

“Recycling technologies are mostly at a R&D or pre-commercial stage, and have to be further developed,” Núñez explained. “However, their upscale is completely viable and to achieve it, collaboration is key. Several projects are already working in solving the mentioned issues, as FiberEUse, DecomBlades and ZEBRA project.”

Núñez sees mechanical recycling as the cheapest and most widely available technology today, noting that it is at a commercial level already, but that market for the recycled material it produces still needs to improve, with challenges rising due to the loss of mechanical properties in the fiber during processing.

More promising is the development of thermal recycling (mostly pyrolysis), which is nearly at a commercial level, with some small companies providing services and already handling limited volume. In this process the fibers are still reduced in quality compared to virgin fibers so cannot be used for new blades but they can be used for non-structural applications.

The final approach involves chemical recycling and is still at an R&D stage, making it too expensive for current uses, but with the potential to produce the highest quality recycled material with mechanical properties approaching those of new fibers.

“The market for these recycled fibres has to be created and the process is constantly being improved to achieve better quality fibres,” Nunez said. 

For breakbulk operators, the true size of the market opportunity from such recycling networks will likely depend on which of these technologies prevails and the end uses of recycled materials. Not least, as transport may well include delivery from the decommissioned wind farm to the recycling center as well as follow on shipment of recycled material to industry. 

An estimated 38 gigawatts of wind energy capacity is forecast to reach the age of 20 operational years or more by 2025, creating pressure to develop decommissioning infrastructure speedily. With many of these older sites occupying prime locations for wind speed and grid connectivity, the desire by operators to replace old components is typically higher than for other power facilities, where a new plant can simply be constructed elsewhere. 

Christoph Zipf, communications manager for industry association WindEurope, predicts that the demand for wind turbine dismantling and recycling “is going to increase sharply,” noting that Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark are likely to lead decommissioning activity as they are home to “some of the oldest markets for wind energy.”

A further prospect for breakbulk carriage will be the direct reuse of wind turbine blades in secondary wind farms or projects in developing nations. While the latest multi-gigawatt wind farms are pushing ever larger blade sizes, this approach will not work for all locations and some developers are still forecast to use older designs for years to come


Rapid Growth

Expanding the opportunities in this space, a growing number of companies now provide composite recycling services and while the volumes that can be processed is limited today, the AEE predicts that this will "grow rapidly" as investment ramps up over the next decade.

Outside of the wind industry, investment into material research is also growing and the introduction of tighter carbon regulation is expected to drive the use of recycled composites, replacing traditional materials in industries from construction to petrochemicals.

“As a strategic industry, the wind industry strives to be a leader in Europe’s transition to a more sustainable, circular approach to managing resources. Through a circular economy approach, decommissioned wind turbine blades can be circulated into continual use of resources, along with the composite materials disposed of by other sectors (i.e., marine, construction, aviation, etc.),” Núñez added.

Alongside technological advancements, pressure is also building to tighten regulation around turbine blade disposal, with industry participants calling for a landfill ban on blades in the next four years. A consortium of turbine suppliers including Siemens Gamesa, Vestas, GE, and Ørsted, investing in a project to commercialize sustainable recycling and many stakeholders now backing plans for an EU-wide ban on sending turbine blades to landfill.

 “The wind industry recognizes landfill disposal of decommissioned wind turbine blades as a waste of valuable resources,” Núñez said. “To accelerate circularity, the wind industry calls for a Europe-wide landfill ban on decommissioned wind turbine blades by 2025. This means the industry commits to re-use, recycle or recover 100 percent of decommissioned blades. The ban should also apply to other large composite components that can be found in the nacelle.”