Wind turbine blades End of Life through Open HUBs for circular materials in sustainable business models

A sustainable Circular Economy in the wind sector requires to solve the End of Life problematic of the Wind Turbine Blades, prioritizing environmental factors and fairly sharing the efforts to overcome the technologic, economic and social barriers among all the key actors.

To this end, EoLO-HUBs will develop 3 open hubs to co-design, co-create and demonstrate new technologies, organizational structures, business models and legal recommendations to implement CE according to the needs of the different European regions.

The Knowledge Hub will connect stakeholders to effectively collaborate on similar initiatives, sharing data and spilling over good practices to replicate success stories during and after the project.

The other 2 hubs will build a large-scale demonstration covering the full value chain for WTB reusing and recycling from the dismantling to the valorisation in heavy composite sectors through efficient waste recycling solutions, while specific needs of EoL composites in wind technology are representing.

The Onshore Hub will include the necessity of implementing a Zero-pollution and mobile system for dismantling onshore technologies without jeopardise the environment and maximising the recovering of paints and coatings as well as enabling the recyclability of chemical building blocks (solvolysis).

The Multi-sectorial and Offshore Hub will include the necessity of adapting current high volume composite recycling technologies (pyrolysis) to obtain a high yield of rGF and cGF in a Zero-waste approach collaborating with other sectors as well as to demonstrate how to prepare the gateways for offshore technologies to connect to the new value chain for recycling WTB.

In this way, EoLO-HUBs will create a long-term collaboration of key actors with access to relevant demonstration scenarios to ensure the recycling of almost 90% of the WTB materials, creating a circular economy that generates jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emission by 2030.