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When the offshore wind turbines fall silent: What happens to the waste?
20,000 turbine blades from offshore wind farms in Europe risk becoming a major waste problem because we lack good ways to process them sustainably.
The turbines have turned offshore wind into clean power on land since the early 1990s.
In the years ahead, they will be dismantled one by one.
This is what researchers believe will happen: As the oldest ones are taken down, new environmental problems are created.
By 2040, this could involve up to 20,000 turbine blades. These may end up buried or incinerated, because there are still no requirements for recycling the materials.
“In trying to use wind power to solve a major climate challenge, there is a risk that we have created new and even greater resource challenges,” said Pankaj Ravindra Gode.
Choosing the worst solutions
Gode recently completed his PhD examining how the circular economy can best be introduced into the offshore wind industry
The research is part of FME North Wind, a research centre for offshore wind.
In a recent study, he and researcher Øyvind Bjørgum show how the industry is opting out of sustainable, circular solutions such as recycling and reuse.
Instead, the industry chooses the easiest, cheapest, and most environmentally harmful options – landfills and incineration.
“Landfills are the biggest problem because we end up throwing away enormous amounts of recyclable, reusable, and valuable materials. Landfills sites also occupy large areas that become unusable for purposes such as agriculture," says Gode.
Obstacles and solutions
The study is based on interviews with 21 stakeholders in the industry. The results highlights factors that can drive the industry in a circular direction and what prevents it.
The study also identifies measures that can help overcome those obstacles.
Wind turbines last 20–25 years
Wind turbines are usually decommissioned after 20–25 years, which is often the lifespan specified in contracts.
Some can operate for longer, but this depends on regulations, environmental factors, and maintenance.
Around 85 per cent of the parts in a wind turbine can be recycled or reused.
The exception is the blades. They are made from composite materials, a combination of two or more different substances.
The mixture makes the blades both lightweight and extremely strong. The downside is that their complex structure makes them difficult to recycle or reuse. That's why they usually end up in a landfill.
A graveyard for wind turbine blades
In 2020, there were numerous media reports from a municipal landfill site in Casper, Wyoming, USA.
Bloomberg was the first outlet to describe the landfill site as a final resting place for wind turbine blades that “resemble bleached whale bones nestled against one another.”
BBC followed up with the article: What happens to all the old wind turbines?
The problem is that tens of thousands of ageing onshore wind turbines will be decommissioned within a few years. Most would end up in landfill sites because they could not be recycled.
Offshore wind is next
The world’s first offshore wind farm, Vindeby in Denmark, opened in 1991. Researchers have previously estimated that around 1,800 offshore wind turbines will be decommissioned in Europe over the next four years.
By 2040, this number could rise to almost 20,000.
“The decommissioning and further processing of wind turbine blades is a real challenge,” says Marthe Michelsen Bottéri, communications manager at Havvind Norge, the national competence centre for offshore wind.
She says that both the industry and research communities are actively working on the issue. She points to the company Gjenkraft.
They have developed technology to recycle and reuse materials such as glass and carbon fibre. Equinor, the Norwegian state energy company, is also collaborating with companies working on similar solutions.
“Unfortunately, not all companies are trying to implement circular solutions,” says Bottéri.
Setting requirements for better solutions
Today’s challenges primarily concern foreign and European wind farms. Norway’s first offshore wind farm, Hywind Tampen, only opened in 2023.
The Sørlige Nordsjø II wind farm has been awarded, while Utsira Nord has been announced for tender. 20 other offshore wind areas are also being assessed.
“We have set requirements in the prequalification criteria for Sørlige Nordsjø II and in the qualitative criteria for Utsira Nord that applicants must submit a project plan,” says Henrik Hoel.
He is the senior communications adviser at the Norwegian Ministry of Energy.
“The plan must outline the proposed measures for waste management, as well as the potential for material recycling and reuse. By setting these requirements, we can help promote better solutions,” he says.
More wind farms, larger blades
More and more offshore wind farms are being built around the world. The turbines are becoming larger.
The next generation of rotors will have a diameter of 310 metres, which is as long as three football pitches.
China is building and testing offshore wind turbines that are 200 metres tall, and each turbine requires several hundred tonnes of steel, concrete, and other familiar construction materials.
In addition come rare earth metals such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.
Researchers believe wind power may therefore create larger resource challenges. When their service life is over, the wind turbine blades are transported ashore.
Thousands of kilometres of cables worth millions are left abandoned and buried on the seabed. Not only does this put significant strain on the environment, it is also a waste of large amounts of valuable materials.
Metals are a key factor in global power dynamics
Rare earth elements are used in technology and energy systems, are scarce, and China dominates the market.
China has large reserves and a virtual monopoly on their trade.
One of the informants in the NTNU study believes that if China stops supplying the world with these rare metals, our technology will fail – and this would become a serious geopolitical problem.
Prohibition – in certain countries
“One of the major obstacles to the circular economy is that legislation varies from country to country,” says another of the stakeholders in the NTNU study.
Landfilling of turbine blades is prohibited in Germany, Finland, Austria, and the Netherlands.
Some companies get around this obstacle by transporting decommissioned wind turbine blades to countries where they can be buried. The UK and France have some of the highest concentrations of landfills in Europe.
An EU ban is not in place – yet. Nor is a Norwegian ban on landfilling and incineration of this waste on the Ministry of Energy’s agenda.
The EU has responsibility
“The industry is international, and recycling and reuse technologies are mainly developed for a European and global market. Norway largely follows the same waste management regulations as the EU. It's therefore most natural that this challenge is primarily addressed through a common European regulatory framework,” says Hoel.
NTNU researcher Pankaj Ravindra Gode believes that an EU ban could prevent actors from exporting the problems.
“It would create a level playing field, where the rules are the same for everyone and no one can circumvent the system,” he says.
How green is it really?
How green and sustainable is wind power really, when thousands of tonnes of unmanageable waste could be landfilled or incinerated every year going forwards?
“Onshore and offshore wind power is considered a green energy source because it has very low greenhouse gas emissions during operation and a significantly lower overall climate footprint than the fossil-based alternatives. At the same time, it's important to continue working on improving resource use and waste management,” says Hoel.
Marthe Michelsen Bottéri at Havvind Norge says an important point for the industry is that much of the climate benefits come from the emissions reductions that renewable energy provides over several decades.
“At the same time, the industry must clearly manage material streams responsibly throughout the entire life cycle,” she says.
Reference:
Godem P.R. & Bjørgum, Ø. Investigating pathways to improve the circular economy adoption for near-end-of-life offshore wind farms, Journal of Environmental Management, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2025.127679
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Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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