Danish sustainable energy firm Vestas revealed a “circularity solution” that can potentially address the wind turbine blade’s landfill issues through an innovative recycling approach, per the press release.
The wind turbine giant proposes an interesting approach that “renders epoxy-based turbine blades as circular, without the need for changing the design or composition of blade material.”
Vestas’ circularity solution
The solution can apparently be used with blades already in use by fusing newly found chemical technology created through the CETEC program under the company’s partnership with Olin and Stena Recycling.
Once fully developed, it will be unnecessary to rebuild blades or dispose of epoxy-based blades in landfills after they are no longer used. That said, they can be simply disassembled and reused.
“Until now, the wind industry has believed that turbine blade material calls for a new approach to design and manufacture to be either recyclable, or beyond this, circular, at end of life. Going forward, we can now view old epoxy-based blades as a source of raw material.
Once this new technology is implemented at scale, legacy blade material currently sitting in landfills and blade material in active windfarms can be disassembled and reused. This signals a new era for the wind industry, and accelerates our journey towards achieving circularity.”
Lisa Ekstrand, Vestas’ VP and Head of Sustainability
The wind turbine giant asserts that with the aid of a recently developed value chain and the cooperation of the Nordic recycling company Stena Recycling and Olin, it will now accelerate the chemical disassembly process into a commercialized solution.
It is worth noting that the blade’s epoxy resin has chemical characteristics that have historically been hard to disassemble into reusable parts. That said, the process of recycling wind turbines has been likewise tough even until now.
Finally, this new discovery would indeed aid the current issues faced by the wind industry in recycling wind turbine blades. It will also aid Vestas in manufacturing new wind turbine blades from reused blade components.
“In the coming years, thousands of turbines will be decommissioned or repowered, representing a major sustainability challenge but also a valuable source of composite materials.”
MD Stena Recycling Denmark, Henrik Grand Petersen
