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Benches, playgrounds and bike sheds: Creative ways to reuse wind turbine blades

What happens to wind turbines at the end of their life cycle? These companies have found new ways to repurpose hard-to-recycle blades

Wind turbine blades are harder to recycle than other elements of the turbines. But start-ups are finding a way to repurpose them.

Coco Liu and Sanne Wass
Wed Jan 3 2024 - 08:42

When a wind turbine reaches the end of its life cycle, roughly 85 per cent of its components – including the steel tower, copper wire and gearing – can be recycled. Turbine blades, however, have proven a more intractable challenge.

Made primarily from fibreglass, these blades lack the metals and minerals that attract recyclers. They’re also coated with epoxy resins that make them particularly difficult to crush. As a result, most retired turbine blades end up incinerated or in landfills.

That’s a problem for an industry that’s growing rapidly, adding more wind power – and making more blades – every year. Roughly 78 gigawatts of wind capacity was installed worldwide in 2022, enough to power about 17 million US homes for one year. By the end of this decade, at least another 1,000 gigawatts of wind farms will be built, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry organisation.

To deal with this challenge, the world’s biggest turbine makers are stepping up efforts to create recyclable blades. But perfecting that technology, and implementing it, will take years. In the meantime, turbines installed in the early 2000s are starting to reach the end of their lifespan. In Europe alone, roughly 25,000 metric tons of wind turbine blades will be phased out each year by 2025, according to some estimates.

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That’s where the start-ups come in.

“We’re delaying the disposal,” says Angela Nagle, a former Intel engineer who in 2022 cofounded Ireland-based BladeBridge to convert decommissioned turbine blades into pedestrian bridges. Although the upcycled bridges will eventually reach the end of their life cycle, too, Nagle says they buy the technology some time. “It’s delaying the problem to see if somebody else can find a third life solution,” she says.

BladeBridge is one of a handful of companies turning old wind turbine blades into new products. Whether park benches, bike racks or playgrounds, these upcycled goods aren’t always cost competitive – at least not yet. But the early adopters are making progress that’s needed to prevent the clean-energy transition from developing environmental downsides of its own.

Turbine-blade bridges in Ireland

Ireland is a global leader in wind power: Its domestic capacity is 4,500 megawatts and the country has onshore wind farms dating back to 1992. That’s also why Ireland is expected to see a wave of wind-turbine retirements over the next decades. As the Government beefs up efforts to keep discards away from landfills, wind farm owners will need greener waste-management options.

Outside Cork City, a 5.5m pedestrian bridge is one such an alternative. BladeBridge built the bridge from scratch using two retired turbine blades, each 42 feet long, to craft side girders that would typically be made from steel, as well as several other structural components.

Commissioned by the county, the bridge is part of a new cycling route, according to Nagle – one of many Ireland is in the process of building. By reducing the use of steel, BladeBridge estimates its project’s emissions are 17 per cent lower than conventional pedestrian bridges over the course of a 60-year lifespan. The start-up is also building two more blade bridges on a popular hiking trail and expects to complete both in 2024.

A turbine-blade playground in the Netherlands

When Rotterdam-based Foundation Kinderparadijs Meidoorn needed to commission a new playground back in 2006, it turned to Superuse Studios, an architecture firm known for repurposing used items. The partnership resulted in one of the earliest wind turbine-repurposing projects in the world.

The maze-like playground, crafted with five damaged turbine blades, was completed in 2008 in the garden of the Kinderparadijs Meidoorn. Children can climb up towers made from blade bases and crawl through a tunnel that was once a 25m blade. Roughly 15 years after it opened, the playground “is still in very good shape,” says Jos de Krieger, a partner at Superuse who recently visited the project.

Krieger says the playground offers dual benefits: keeping turbine blades out of landfills or incinerators, and providing a piece of environmentally friendly infrastructure. The carbon footprint of constructing Superuse’s turbine-blade playground was roughly 90 per cent smaller than it would have been for comparable equipment made from wood and steel, according to a third-party assessment.

The Kinderparadijs Meidoorn project was Superuse’s first using turbine blades; by 2021, the company had built enough expertise to launch a new business, Blade-Made, that specialises in upcycling blades into benches, playgrounds and climbing walls.

A turbine-blade bike shelter in Denmark

In the main parking lot of the Port of Aalborg in Denmark stands a swooping bicycle shelter whose unique shape provides a roof to keep bikes and riders dry and protected from the wind. The shelter, meant to encourage more employees to cycle, was conceived as an alternative to typically “boring” bike shed designs, says Brian Dalby Rasmussen, environmental coordinator at the port.

Rasmussen was inspired by the Port of Aalborg’s role as an important facilitator for the wind industry in Denmark, and a nearby turbine-manufacturing plant owned by Siemens Gamesa agreed to donate part of a discarded blade for the project.

Then things got complicated. Design and calculations were tricky without data or drawings of the blade, and Rasmussen, a civil engineer by trade, built the first scale model at home with cardboard and wood. The shelter’s construction required plenty of trial and error, and handling a 3-ton piece of fibreglass posed a major challenge for the builders, blacksmiths and engineers.

The shelter opened in late 2019, over a year after Rasmussen built the first prototype, and the reception has been universally positive. Rasmussen hopes more companies are inspired by the approach. A wind turbine blade is “almost indestructible,” he says. “And it’s beautiful if you get the design right.”

Turbine-blade park benches in the US

Beautiful design is one of the first things visitors notice about the benches at Every Child’s Playground in Avon, Ohio. Their droplet-shaped shells – painted by local artists – are made by Ohio start-up Canvus out of decommissioned wind turbine blades.

Canvus offers 11 blade-based products that can be manufactured at scale. Its “deborah” bench, for instance, has shade protection and a swing, while another design, the “beacon,” can be a bench, planter or fountain. So far, Canvus’s craftsmen have given several hundred blades a second life, says co-founder Parker Kowalski.

The company’s customers are mostly corporate clients who donate the benches and planters they purchase to public spaces. Each item – prices range from roughly $3,500 to $9,500 – doubles as a marketing vehicle for the donor, who is named on an attached plaque. Since it began commercial production in June, Canvus has sold more than 300 products that are now installed across dozens of locations in the US, Kowalski says. – Bloomberg

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