Blade Manufacturers Announce Joint Commitment to Recycling
The DecomBlades innovation project has addressed the lack of a market for the glass fibre reinforced composite with a new blade material passport, making dismantling and recycling easier. The material passports were developed by mapping out the composition of the blades of three major blade manufacturers: Siemens Gamesa, LM Wind Power, and Vestas. Other companies, including Nordex Group, Enercon and GE Vernova, are planning to join this initiative aimed at implementing standardized material passports in the wind industry.
John Korsgaard, Senior Director, LM Wind Power and Chair of DecomBlades Consortium, explains: “The wind industry strongly supports the development of viable value chains for recycling blades. With the commitment to provide blade material passports, we hope to accelerate the establishment of a viable market for recycling blades. The information in the blade material passport will be valuable for blade recycling companies and will help them enhance their process efficiency. We need to work together to industrialize the blade recycling sector, enabling 100% blade recycling in the future.”
Sophus Borch, Business Development Manager at HJHansen Recycling, one of the partners in the DecomBlades project, states: “The complex composition of a Wind Turbine Blade makes it very hard to recycle and also very hard to know how to do the pre-processing and further processing of the blade efficiently. When working on-site we do not need the extremely complex descriptions of the blades, but a simple tool that tells us the dimensions and where we can find the different elements. This means we can speed up our processes at a glance. The Blade Material Passport supports this exact thinking.”
