- Energy
No evidence that eroding wind turbine blades harm farmland
Key takeaway
Researchers don’t think that wind turbines emit harmful quantities of fiberglass, microplastics, or BPA. In fact, the leading edges of most wind turbine blades are coated with a layer of protective plastic material specifically designed to prevent the fiberglass from eroding. That coating can emit microplastics and BPA, but only in relatively tiny amounts. Moreover, there’s no evidence that these emissions damage the crops grown on nearby farmland.
Reviewed content
Verdict:
Claim:
Farmers have lost their crops and livelihood due to microplastics and fiberglass from eroding wind turbine blades.
Verdict detail
Inadequate support:
There’s no evidence that eroding wind turbine blades are toxic to farmland. Recorded instances of fiberglass scattering across land appear to be rare, isolated incidents, caused by turbines malfunctioning rather than by blades eroding.
Misleading:
Thousands of wind turbines are built next to farmland without placing their farms at risk. The vast majority of U.S. cropland situated next to a turbine continues to grow crops, years after the turbine starts operating.
Lacks context:
Wind turbines emit a tiny amount of microplastics compared to other human sources like tires, paints, footwear, and textiles. Airborne concentrations of BPA – a compound found in plastic – near a turbine are actually lower than airborne BPA concentrations in many major cities.
Full Claim
Because wind turbine blades are made of fiberglass and “Forever Chemicals” also called “BPAs”, it peels off and goes wherever the wind blows. So far, farmers in New York, Iowa, and Oklahoma have found microplastics and fiberglass in their fields from their neighbors’ wind farms located over a mile away. Now these farmers have lost their crops and livelihood. They can’t sell that hay or feed it to their cows – it’s unsafe according to veterinarians.
Review
A common theme of misleading claims about renewable energy is that solar panels, wind turbines, or lithium-ion batteries ‘aren’t really green’ – that these technologies instead come with significant drawbacks that their proponents are trying to conceal. One of these claims is that wind turbine blades emit environmental pollutants that harm people and farmland.
In late January 2025, multiple Facebook users reposted an image of an eroded wind turbine blade, each post collecting tens of thousands of views. The image’s accompanying text claims that wind turbines are a source of “microplastics and fiberglass” (both of which can be environmental pollutants) as well as “BPAs” (most likely a reference to bisphenol A or BPA, a chemical used in plastics manufacturing that can linger in final products). The text also claims that these substances contaminate nearby farmland and render it useless for growing crops.
But these claims greatly exaggerate the amount of pollutants that wind turbines emit and any impacts they cause, as we’ll show below.
No evidence that wind turbines cost farmers their livelihoods
It’s true that wind turbines erode – as raindrops, hailstones, dust grains, insects, or other particles strike a turbine blade’s leading edge in midair, they eat away at the blade’s outer coating[1]. But there’s no evidence showing that this harms farmland.
The post may be exaggerating real incidents where malfunctioning wind turbines scattered debris across the ground. For example, local news in Iowa reported that one farmer had to clean up fiberglass after lightning struck a turbine on her land. For another, after a turbine caught fire in a New York state town, local residents reported finding fiberglass on their land, though it’s unclear if any fell on farmland.
But these appear to be isolated incidents, caused not by erosion, but instead by catastrophic failures (which are rare, as we’ve covered in a past review). Science Feedback found no evidence that farmers have lost “their crops and livelihood” due to blade material naturally eroding away or that “veterinarians” have ever declared hay to be unsafe for cows due to the presence of a normally functioning wind turbine.
On the other hand, many wind turbines harmlessly coexist with farms. According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analysis, 56% of wind turbines built on rural U.S. land between 2012 and 2020 were built on cropland. If wind turbines really did toxify the land, we might expect to see these turbines preventing large amounts of land from continuing to grow crops. But the USDA found that 99% of U.S. cropland sites that saw wind turbines built between 2012 and 2017 were still used as cropland three years afterwards.
Wind energy isn’t a major source of microplastics
Wind turbine operators want their blades to erode as little as possible. Blades are designed to be aerodynamic, and erosion roughens a blade’s edge, making the turbine less efficient at converting wind into electrical energy[2]. If a turbine’s blades wear out, its operator may have to make expensive repairs. Blade erosion, then, is a rather active research area.
What actually gets eroded? Most wind turbine blades are fashioned from composite materials like fiberglass, but fiberglass usually isn’t the material that ‘peels away’. Sergio Campobasso, Senior Lecturer in Renewable Energy Engineering at Lancaster University, told Science Feedback:
“The type of material that gets eroded away depends on the stage of the erosion process. The majority of modern multi-megawatt wind turbines feature a Leading Edge Protection (LEP) system, which is a layer of erosion-resistant material applied around the leading edge. The LEP system is applied on the composite material (substrate) of the leading edge. The LEP usually consists of a plastic material, such as polyurethane or epoxy. In the initial stages of erosion, the material eroded away is that of the LEP system. If no repair is performed, erosion progresses to the substrate. At this stage, the eroded material is that of the composite which may be different from that of the LEP system.”
So, in most cases, the eroded material from a wind turbine blade is the plastic of the protective coating described above. But does that coating emit microplastics or BPA as it erodes? Not in significant quantities, according to research.
The authors of a 2024 study estimated that each Danish wind turbine blade emitted 30 to 540 grams of plastic per year on average – in total, around 1.6 tonnes per year for all of Denmark[4]. If that sounds like a lot, it’s up to thousands of times smaller (see Figure 2) than the amounts of plastic that wear off shoes (an estimated 100 to 1,000 tonnes per year), textiles (200 to 1,000 tonnes), paint (200 to 1,290 tonnes), and, most of all, rubber tires (4,200 to 6,600 tonnes)[4]. It’s not that wind power is rare in Denmark – wind turbines generate more than half of the country’s electricity.
A 2023 report by the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) found a similar story at play in the Netherlands: each wind turbine blade emitted about 338 grams of plastic per year on average, for a total of about 3 tonnes (0.0005% of microplastics emissions in a country where wind provided 24% of electricity). Even in a worst-case scenario that assumes all wind turbine blades don’t have LEP coatings and are eroding at a rate that researchers consider to be unrealistic, that last figure only rises to about 39 tonnes (0.07% of Dutch microplastics emissions).
Although leading edge epoxy can contain BPA, the evidence doesn’t suggest that turbines emit BPA at dangerous levels. A 2024 report commissioned by the Dutch provincial government of Flevoland measured 0.005 billionths of a gram of BPA per cubic meter of air (0.005 ng/m³) directly behind a wind turbine’s blades. That figure isn’t especially high – it’s comparable to BPA measured in rural areas of Italy, Germany, and China (which range from 0.01 to 0.1 ng/m³), and it’s significantly lower than BPA measured outdoors in major world cities (which can range from 0.1 to 14.5 ng/m³)[5]. It’s also millions of times smaller than the European Chemical Agency’s recommended limit for BPA in the workplace, 200,000 ng/m³.
Ongoing research aims to make these already low emissions even lower. Campobasso told Science Feedback:
“A substantial amount of research, including ours, is being performed into measures to mitigate or suppress blade erosion. Although this research was prompted by concerns on energy losses and costs of operation and maintenance, the knowledge and technologies developed so far for erosion mitigation or suppression will undoubtedly contribute to reducing greatly the level of all microplastics emitted by wind turbines.”
Simply because wind turbines can emit microplastics doesn’t mean that they emit a lot
It’s easy to claim that something can be toxic, or that something can result in an undesirable byproduct, but these claims are only meaningful with proper context. For example, it is true that wind turbines can emit microplastics – but in relatively minuscule amounts. It is also true that wind turbines can deposit fiberglass on land – but only in very rare incidents where turbines malfunction.
For another example, wind energy opponents often claim that wind turbines will produce ‘millions of tonnes’ of waste. But, as Science Feedback has reviewed, even this perhaps imposing figure is a tiny fraction of the waste that the world generates – in fact, it’s also a tiny fraction of the amount of waste that fossil fuel plants generate.
Conclusion
In short, there’s no evidence to support the claim that wind turbines are spewing out toxic pollutants that harm farmland. Science Feedback found no recorded evidence of farmers losing their crops due to natural erosion of a wind turbine’s blade. On the contrary, the vast majority of farms next to wind turbines carry on as normal, at least in the U.S. There’s also no evidence to show that wind turbines emit microplastics or BPA into the environment at significant levels.
References:
- Mishnaevsky et al. (2021) Leading edge erosion of wind turbine blades: Understanding, prevention and protection. Renewable Energy.
- Herring et al. (2019) The increasing importance of leading edge erosion and a review of existing protection solutions. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Solutions.
- Verma et al. (2021) Minimum Leading Edge Protection Application Length to Combat Rain-Induced Erosion of Wind Turbine Blades. Energies.
- Mishnaevsky et al. (2024) Microplastics Emission from Eroding Wind Turbine Blades: Preliminary Estimations of Volume. Energies.
- Vasiljevic and Harner. (2021) Bisphenol A and its analogues in outdoor and indoor air: Properties, sources and global levels. Science of the Total Environment.
