Everyone in wind knows the punchline by now: the tower, the copper, the gearbox all have buyers waiting. The blade goes to landfill. WindEurope counts about 20,000 tonnes of decommissioned blade material in 2025, heading to 55,000 tonnes a year by 2030.
I work on commercialization at Cycle Momentum, a climate tech accelerator, and blade recycling ventures come through our pipeline regularly. The recycling chemistry usually isn't the hard part. The truck is.
Before any recycler touches the material, a crew has to cut a 70-metre composite structure into truckable sections on site, manage the dust, and pay to haul the pieces somewhere. Those costs eat the margin first. A process that pencils out with free blades at the gate can die completely once real transport distances enter the spreadsheet. Geography decides winners here more than patents do.
The routes that do work are instructive. Veolia has processed more than 7,000 U.S. blades since 2020, shredding them into fuel and raw material for cement kilns - one 7-ton blade displaces nearly 5 tons of coal plus silica and limestone. Not glamorous. But cement plants exist everywhere blades exist, which quietly solves the transport problem. Meanwhile the higher-value routes - pyrolysis, solvolysis, engineered materials - are still scarce at scale, per the IEA's blade-recycling task force. Two of those pilots - HPSH's blades-to-concrete project in Quebec among them - are in our portfolio, so discount my enthusiasm accordingly.
Blades don't wait for year 25. Repowering pulls them early - much of the U.S. volume Veolia takes in comes from repower projects, not expiry dates. Waste shows up on economics' schedule.
If you operate or manage wind assets: is end-of-life disposition part of your repowering contracts yet - a named route, a named counterparty, a price? Or is it still handled ad hoc, blade by blade, when the crane shows up? And if you're on the OEM or EPC side, who do you think should own that obligation?