Recycling Wind Turbine Blades Is Now Possible!

A Danish wind turbine company has developed a chemical solution capable of disintegrating blades in an eco-friendly way, thus offering a solution to a potential massive sustainability problem in the ever-growing renewable energy industry.

“This signals a new era for the wind industry,” explains Vestas Wind Systems A/S, the largest producer of wind turbines in the world.

The chemical solution developed by Vestas allows for the durable epoxy resin to be broken down and recycled, and it can be used on blades currently sitting in landfills and those to be decommissioned eventually. According to estimations from Wind Europe, 25,000 tons a year of wind blades will be decommissioned by 2025, reaching 52,000 tons a year by 2030, and the association promoting the use of wind power in Europe is urging authorities to ban blades from ending up in dumps. Denmark’s Aarhus University and US-based Olin Corp joined forces to bring Vestas’s process to life. The wind turbine company is ready to launch a two-year pilot project in order to roll out its process on a commercial scale as soon as possible to fix the blade problem.