Europe Is Committed to Recycling End-of-Life Wind Turbine Blades

Starting in 2026, Europe’s wind energy industry has committed itself to ensuring that wind turbine blades do not end up in landfills once they reach the end of their service life. The EU-funded research project REWIND is exploring ways to reuse this composite waste. The German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research Denkendorf (DITF) are one of 13 project partners from seven countries.

REWIND stands for Efficient Decommissioning, Repurposing and Recycling to increase the Circularity of End-of-Life Wind Energy Systems. The project partners are developing basic technologies and processes for the dismantling, recycling, and reuse of composite materials. The goal is to make wind turbine blades recyclable instead of sending them to landfills or incinerating them.

The consortium has validated a model that can predict the mechanical behavior of recovered materials with an accuracy of over 90%. This makes them suitable for demanding applications, such as in electric vehicles or as insulation material.

At the DITF, yarns and fabrics are developed from both glass and carbon fibers recycled by the project partners for use in new components or repair kits for wind turbines. In an initial step, the recycled fibers were examined, primarily to determine which processing methods they are suitable for.

The research team is pursuing two different approaches. In the first process route, the recycled glass fibers are processed into high-value textile reinforcements. To do this, the fibers are pre-opened, carded, spun into yarns, and then processed into fabrics that are reinforced in both one or two directions. A first milestone has been the development of a recycled glass fiber yarn (rGF/polyamide-6 yarn) with a fiber volume content of around 40%, which is suitable for thermoplastic composite applications, such as structural components in automotive engineering.

Furthermore, the researchers succeeded in producing a yarn consisting of as much as 98% recycled glass fibers (rGF). The yarn was then used to manufacture a woven fabric with parallel fiber orientation (UD fabric). This demonstrated for the first time that specifically oriented textile reinforcement structures made from recycled glass fibers can be produced, which are optimally adapted to mechanical loads.

The second process route investigates the processing of long-fiber delamination (LFD) tapes - which are planed directly from wind turbine blades - into UD fabrics. These LFD tapes represent a novel class of semi-finished textile products manufactured from fully cured recycled glass-fiber-reinforced plastic (GFRP). Currently, research is conducted to determine the extent to which these intermediate products are suitable as high-performance reinforcement structures for fiber-reinforced composites.

Partners:

AIMPLAS

TECKNIKER

IPC – Centre Technique Industriel de la Plasturgie et des Composites

Miljøskærm

Hochschule Pforzheim – Gestaltung, Technik, Wirtschaft und Recht

Deutsche Institute für Textil – und Faserforschung Denkendorf (DITF)

Alke Electric Vehicles

Suez Group

Bcircular

Composite Patch

R-Nanolab

CiaoTech-Gruppo PNO

AEMAC.