Some wind turbine blades are made from balsa wood, but they’re not a major part of Amazon deforestation, contrary to online claims

A common strategy that misinformers use against renewable energy is to claim that wind turbines or solar panels ‘aren’t as green as they seem’. And a common tactic is to criticize the materials that these energy sources use. 

So, what do we make of this recent claim that wind turbines aren’t green because their blades are made with balsa wood “plundered from the Amazon rainforest”?

Opponents of renewable energy aren’t the only ones discussing the wood in wind turbine blades – environmentalist groups have noted this for several years now.

But it’s spread elsewhere, and it comes in even more dramatic variants. You’ll see anti-wind websites claim that ‘deforestation in the Amazon is increasing’ as a result of balsa harvesting, or that balsa production causes “potentially more environmental problems than the windmills it creates can solve”.

Are these dramatic claims true? In short, some wind turbine blades do use balsa wood – but not all do.

Some turbine blades use balsa wood, but many do not

Wind turbines pose an engineering challenge. Their blades must be sturdy to withstand harsh conditions; at the same time, blades must be lightweight to more easily move in the flowing winds. Today’s typical wind turbine blade is designed to meet these demands with a durable fiberglass shell, wrapped around a stiff yet lightweight core (Figure 1).

Building that core requires a material with high street and low weight – and balsa wood has those properties, making it an appealing choice for blademakers^[1].

But balsa only grows in certain tropical climates, and it’s estimated that somewhere between 68 and 90 percent of the world’s balsa comes from just one tropical country: Ecuador. 

Historically, most of Ecuador’s balsa came from artificial plantations: balsa trees are planted, then harvested after they have fully grown, usually after about six years. That changed in 2020, thanks to a spike in demand caused in part by an increase in wind turbine production. 

The ensuing shortage encouraged many to illegally cut down naturally grown balsa trees in the Amazon rainforest, in Ecuador’s east. According to the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency, even legitimate balsa suppliers were selling illegally logged balsa. This ’balsa fever’ had real consequences – journalists widely reported that a rush for wood caused social problems for Indigenous communities in Ecuador.  

We shouldn’t minimize those harms. But is the entire wind industry now dependent on illegal Amazon wood? Probably not.

That is partly because wind turbine blade cores can be made with materials aside from balsa. The balsa shortages of the past several years have only encouraged blade-makers to find alternate materials; the most common is PET foam. PET isn’t environmentally spotless (making it typically requires a chemical found in natural gas) but it’s one of the most easily recycled plastics. Many blade makers indeed use PET foam made from recycled plastic bottles.

According to one estimate, PET already accounted for 20 percent of the material in the world’s blade cores in 2018, rising to 55 percent in 2023.

So, it’s somewhat misleading to say “wind turbine blades are made with balsa wood” – some are, but a large and growing percentage of them are not.

In the big picture, wind turbines are not a major cause of deforestation in the Amazon

We shouldn’t minimize the ways that irresponsible forestry can harm local ecosystems and their people. However, contrary to more extreme anti-wind claims, it is quite misleading to blame wind turbines for deforestation in the Amazon without crucial context. 

By far the largest cause of forest loss in the Amazon isn’t logging, but agriculture – people clearing forest to make way for farms and cattle pastures^[3]. 

In Ecuador, according to Global Forest Watch, agriculture was responsible for 92.7 percent of tree cover loss from 2001 to 2024; by comparison, logging was responsible for just 2.4 percent. 

It’s also important to differentiate between forest degradation – damaging the forest, but leaving it intact – and deforestation – clearing the forest entirely. Illegal balsa logging mostly falls under degradation. Chopping down trees for their wood can damage the forest ecosystem, but the forest can recover; on the other hand, agriculture often means completely erasing the forest and replacing it with farmlands or pastures.

With that in mind, there’s not enough evidence to conclude that balsa wood for wind turbines is causing ‘increased deforestation’ in the Amazon. On the other hand, a 2023 review found that large-scale agriculture was the largest cause of deforestation in most Amazon countries including Ecuador, while logging as a whole had “minor direct impacts” on deforestation^[4].

Conclusion

Every source of electricity has some environmental footprint. Instead of looking at one footprint in isolation, it’s more useful to compare footprints from different sources. When we do this, we find that wind turbines are almost always ‘greener’ than fossil fuel sources.

For example, you’ll see claims that wind turbine blades produce lots of waste that can’t be recycled. But, as we’ve covered in a past review, the estimated mass of wind turbine blade waste created before 2050 is less than the amount of waste the world creates in a single year from burning coal.

Likewise, some claims purport that building wind turbines creates a ‘staggering quantity’ of CO2 emissions. But, as we’ve covered in another past review, coal and gas plants require a constant supply of fuel and burn a constant stream of CO2 emissions. (In fact, fossil fuel extraction has historically been a major cause of deforestation in Ecuador.)

As a consequence, fossil fuel plants are tens of times more greenhouse-gas-intensive than wind turbines over their entire lives, no matter where in the world they are built.  These emissions go on to cause climate change – something that itself exacerbates tree loss in the Amazon^[5].

References

• 1 – Li et al. (2025) Optimization of Hierarchical Groove–Perforation Structures in PET Foam Cores for Wind Turbine Blade Applications. Materials.
• 2 – Oliveira et al. (2020) Ultrasound-based identification of damage in wind turbine blades using novelty detection. Ultrasonics.
• 3 – Lapola et al. (2023) The drivers and impacts of Amazon forest degradation. Science.
• 4 – Hänggli et al. (2023) A systematic comparison of deforestation drivers and policy effectiveness across the Amazon biome. Environmental Research Letters.
• 5 – Franco et al. (2025) How climate change and deforestation interact in the transformation of the Amazon rainforest. Nature Communications.