COMPOSITES | EVENT REVIEW
Wind turbine industry seeks recycling solutions
An AMI conference hears about projects for recycling wind turbine blades and for making blades more recyclable
Fibre-reinforced polymer composites are not amenable to straightforward recycling. This difficult issue is coming to a head with the epoxy thermoset materials commonly used in composites in wind turbine blades. A wave of decommissioning of first-generation wind energy plants means that an estimated 50,000 tonnes of blades need to find an alternative to landfill or incineration. Various industry projects are trying to find solutions, as was shown at AMI’s Wind Turbine Blade Manufacture conference in Cologne, Germany in November 2021. Vestas, the Danish wind systems manufacturer, has a sustainability strategy which includes a goal of producing zero-waste wind turbines by 2040. At the conference, Troels Nielsen, Cluster Technology Specialist, discussed the company’s Circularity Roadmap, including its recycling element. Vestas
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
aims to increase the recycling rate for its opera- tional waste from 52% in 2020 to 94% by 2030 and 100% by 2040. It also has a goal to manufacture fully recyclable turbine blades by 2030. Nielsen highlighted three collaborative projects
in which Vestas is a partner, including the Decom- Blades recycling project in Denmark. This has three elements: shredding end-of-life blades to allow the material to be used in different products and processes; use of shredded blade material in cement production; and the use of pyrolysis to separate the polymer and fibre materials. Makeen Power is leading development work on the pyrolysis technology, based on its existing Plastcon technology, with the goal of building a pilot plant dedicated to treating wind turbine blade materials. SusWind is a UK project which includes Vestas
Main image: Is it really
end-of-life for turbine blades, or can there be a second life?
March/April 2022 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 15
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
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