Most used wind turbine blades go to waste, but their footprint is still relatively small

The world’s wind power capacity must triple between 2023 and 2030 to keep the globe’s electrical grid on course for net-zero emissions by 2050^[1]. But wind turbines do not last forever. At the end of their lives, wind turbines must be decommissioned and dismantled, and their operators must dispose of their components. Wind power opponents often claim that this process is environmentally unsustainable and use it to question wind power’s credibility as a clean energy source. Variations of this claim have proliferated on social media and on websites like the Daily Mail for several years, including from high-profile writers like Michael Schellenberger. Their claims clash with contrary claims that most of a wind turbine can be recycled.

It is true that wind turbines do leave a distinct environmental footprint when they are dismantled. In particular, wind turbines’ sizeable blades are often made from difficult-to-recycle composite materials like fiberglass. Therefore, most wind turbine blades do go to landfills. Furthermore, as the world’s wind turbine fleet is expected to dramatically grow in size in coming decades, wind energy analysts similarly expect the amount of blade waste to grow.

However, as we show in this Review, the difficult-to-recycle blades only make up a small fraction of a wind turbine’s mass. The contrary claims are correct that the vast majority of a turbine’s mass consists of more reusable materials like concrete and steel. Additionally, recycling blades is an area of active research, and some wind turbine operators have already begun trials. Furthermore, when compared to other waste sources like municipal rubbish and wastes generated by other energy sources such as coal ash, wind turbines are a relatively small contributor of waste.

Most of a wind turbine can be recycled, but recycling blades is a challenge

Turbine blades may be large, but they only make up a small fraction of a wind turbine’s mass. The bulk, as much as 90%, consists of easy-to-reuse materials^[2]. Any given wind turbine’s foundation, tower, and nacelle are largely made from concrete and steel. Concrete pieces can be reused as structural components in other construction projects, or concrete can be broken down for uses like road construction. A wind turbine’s steel parts can, likewise, be reused wholesale or scrapped to create new components^[3]. Wind turbines may also contain smaller amounts of copper (in the form of wiring), iron, and aluminum, which are also easy to reuse.

Wind turbine blades, however, are significantly more difficult to recycle. The claim correctly states that turbine blades are “incredibly durable and built to withstand hurricane-force winds.” At the same time, blades must be lightweight and flexible enough to manufacture in the right shape. To meet these demands, most blades are largely made from a composite material consisting of reinforcing fibers, such as fiberglass or carbon fibers, binded by a polymer resin such as epoxy. This tight interweaving gives the composite its strength, but the same property is a double-edged sword for disposal: separating a composite’s components for recycling is very difficult^[2].

A typical wind turbine lasts about 20 to 30 years before wearing out. Today, that means wind turbines built in the 1990s and 2000s are nearing the end of their life cycles, and many operators have to dispose of wind turbines for the first time. That also means that the volume of waste will grow as the world’s wind energy sector has grown. A 2017 study estimated that the world will have produced a cumulative total of 43 million tonnes of blade waste by 2050^[4] (similar to the total waste that Japanese households produce in a year), though other studies have predicted lower^[5] and higher^[6] cumulative amounts.

Most blades go to the landfill, but not all

It is true that most retired wind turbine blades today wind up in landfills, even though they are made from materials that do not decompose. Disposing of blades in the ground is a relatively low-cost solution, especially in countries like the US where space is plentiful. 

Not all blades go to the landfill, however. In fact, several European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Finland, have banned the landfilling of turbine blades specifically or composites in general. Instead, despite the claim stating otherwise, blades can be and are incinerated. Although burning is less wasteful than landfilling, because the heat can be recovered as energy, burning fiberglass — like burning most types of waste — does release air pollutants^[2,7].

But as wind energy operators dispose of their old blades, not all blades have gone to waste. In Europe, some designers have repurposed whole blades into structures like bicycle sheds, bus shelters, playground equipment, and pedestrian bridges. Additionally, as the claim hints but does not elaborate, one method of recycling is to reuse blade composite for manufacturing cement. Several pilot projects in the US and Europe have already broken down thousands of blades for cement manufacturing. Cement recipes typically call for limestone, but since the fiberglass in blades is rich in silica, shredded blade pieces can be used in lieu of limestone. Although the claim implies that this is ecologically unsustainable, substituting fiberglass silica for limestone actually reduces the CO2 footprint from cement manufacturing. Other projects aim to recycle blade composite by turning it into pellets or chemically separating out glass fibers.

Additionally, some manufacturers are developing recyclable blades from easier-to-recycle materials. In 2022, an offshore wind farm in the North Sea became the first to install this new type of recyclable blade.

For the time being, these methods are too expensive for widespread use. Until they can become more economically viable, most blades still go to waste at the end of their lives. At the same time, state policy targets can encourage recycling. In 2020, the French government set a target of recycling at least 95% of a wind turbine’s mass by the start of 2024. Wind energy operators dismantling wind farms in France for the first time had already achieved that goal by early 2023^[8].

Wind energy is still cleaner than the alternatives

How does wind energy blade waste stack up against other sources of human waste? A 2023 study estimated the total global quantities of waste produced by various sources between 2016 and 2050^[9]. The study found that the world would produce 70.4 billion tonnes of municipal waste from households, 45.6 billion tonnes of coal ash (a byproduct of burning coal in environments like power plants), and 12.4 billion tonnes of plastic waste. In comparison, the study found that aging photovoltaic solar panels would create between 54 and 160 million tonnes of waste.

Figure 1 – The predicted masses of waste produced from assorted sources between 2016 and 2050. While the waste from wind turbine blade waste is not listed on the chart, it is comparable to the waste from solar photovoltaic cells (PV module waste). Source: Mirletz et al, 2023^[9]

This study did not include wind turbine waste, but another estimate of blade waste before 2050 (43 million tonnes) is comparable to its estimates of photovoltaic solar panel waste by the same date (54-160 million tonnes) and multiple orders of magnitude less than its estimates of municipal waste, coal ash, or plastic waste (all of which are in the billions of tonnes)^[4,9]. The world would need to generate some 1,000 times more blade waste to equal the predicted amount of coal ash, a necessary byproduct of relying on coal as an energy source, and even higher estimates of blade waste do not reach that threshold^[6,9]. Furthermore, coal ash and plastic waste both contain toxins that leach into their surrounding environment and can damage both human and ecological health. On the other hand, wind turbine blades in a landfill are relatively inert — both the EU and U.S. classify them as non-hazardous waste^[7]. 

Conclusion

When wind energy critics point to the problem of blade waste — as the author of this claim does to purport that “wind turbine disposal has a large environmental footprint” — they often do not provide this context that blade waste is a relatively small portion of the world’s waste. Additionally, they fail to include the equally important context that wind turbines are clean compared to other energy sources in other ways. For example, even when accounting for emissions from their manufacture, wind turbines emit significantly lower amounts of greenhouse gas than coal or gas natural power plants^[10].

So, while it is true that turbine blades are difficult to recycle, and while it is true that blade waste is a concern for turbine-builders and wind energy operators, blade waste is not a convincing reason to prevent the construction of new wind turbines.

References:

• 1 – Wind power capacity in the Net Zero Scenario, 2015-2030. International Energy Agency.
• 2 – Spini and Bettini (2024). End-of-Life wind turbine blades: Review on recycling strategies. Composites Part B: Engineering. 
• 3 – Wind Europe (2020). Accelerating Wind Turbine Blade Circularity.
• 4 – Liu and Barlow (2017). Wind turbine blade waste in 2050. Waste Management.
• 5 – Electric Power Research Institute (2018). End-of-Life Disposal and Recycling Options for Wind Turbine Blades. 
• 6 – Diez-Cañamero and Mendoza (2023). Circular economy performance and carbon footprint of wind turbine blade waste management alternatives. Waste Management.
• 7 – Beauson et al (2022). The complex end-of-life of wind turbine blades: A review of the European context. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
• 8 – Volard (2023). Wind turbines: can we make blades recyclable? Polytechnique Insights.
• 9 – Mirletz et al (2023). Unfounded concerns about photovoltaic module toxicity and waste are slowing decarbonization. Nature Physics.
• 10 – IPCC (2014). Annex III: Technology-specific Cost and Performance Parameters. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate