Wind turbine blade waste management: a review

• Autor(a) principal: Dantas, Laís Madureira
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/29276
• topic: Wind turbine blade; Waste; Recycling; End of life; Wind turbine; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

Wind energy is in constant growth and over time the installed power of the turbines has increased, as well as its size, due to the development of technology associated. The blades lifetime is around 20-25 years and wind farms are being decommissioned. Only taking into consideration Europeans offshore wind farms, it is expected to have more than 375,000 tons of wind turbine blades by 2043. In 2009 some researches were published, arising the concern about the situation and explaining the blades recyclability difficulty, also mentioning some possible end of life routes for the blades. Most blades are landfilled, which is the last preferred route in the waste hierarchy defined by the European’s Waste Directive. This thesis presents a literature review regarding the wind turbine blade waste management, comprehending the environmental impact associated with the wind energy. The review was done searching for published articles in two data bases: Scopus and Web of Science, applying a set of different keywords to make the search. A total of 849 articles were found and three selection criteria were applied, resulting in 69 articles selected for this thesis. The main conclusion is that many published works states basically the same and, although many studies and projects were developed, until now there is no defined solution and route to this material.