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Circular Wind Guide
Circular Strategies in the Wind Sector
The Circular Wind Guide presents eighteen circular strategies that can be applied across the wind energy value chain. These strategies are grouped into three categories: narrowing resource loops by reducing material use and preventing waste, slowing resource loops by extending the lifetime of turbines and components, and closing resource loops by recovering materials and energy at the end of use.
Together, these strategies provide a practical framework for improving resource efficiency, strengthening supply chain resilience, reducing environmental impacts and creating new economic opportunities within the wind sector.
A. Narrowing the loop: refuce, reduce, rethink
Circular design
Design for circularity has to contribute to sustainability. As such, the design of “circular” wind turbines and farms has to fit into whole system change for a viable economy within environmental boundaries and supporting social well-being.
Technically, circular design is about proactively combining strategies that reduce material use, extend lifetimes of turbines and components, and eventually recycle or reintegrate materials at the end of use.
But circular design necessitates more holistic approaches , where the wind industry has an active voice in changing policy, markets and society to create amenable conditions for their sustainable and circular solutions to thrive.
Circular design is an inclusive process involving diverse stakeholders to enable technical, societal, economic and political change in parallel.
Waste prevention
Waste prevention is about eliminating waste from production rather than having to deal with waste once it has emerged. This reduces costs and the environmental and social impacts from waste management.
Prevention is the highest level on the waste hierarchy, topping preparation for reuse, recycling, other recovery and disposal. It is focused on reducing or avoiding the creation of waste by, for example, proactively designing wastes out of manufacturing processes.
Dematerialisation
Dematerialisation fits within circular economy strategies focused on minimising resource use. It is one of the most effective approaches to reduce costs and environmental impacts, and forms an essential part of building sustainable circular economies together.
The processing of materials (e.g. metals, concrete, glass) and the manufacturing of components costs energy. The relatively modest environmental impacts of wind energy are largely caused by material sourcing and component manufacturing. Creating more value with less materials is therefore vital for sustainability.
This can be achieved through, for example, shape optimisations that make components stronger with less materials. Research, development and innovation is on-going into more efficient alternative materials. Moreover, material use can be minimised with more durable designs to reduce the material intensity for every year that a component is in use.
Data, information and traceability
Insights into volumes, technical characteristics and associated environmental, social and economic values are crucial in enabling a more circular economy. Government bodies, investors and companies alike need such information for decision-making about, for example, commercial viability of circular solutions, reliability of reusing wind turbines and effectiveness of policy changes.
This necessitates systems to enable traceability, considering a variety of aspects such as designing and managing data systems, data collection that builds on existing systems such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Condition Monitoring System (CMS), technical, legal and commercial aspects around data sharing, and standards and regulation to enable safe data collection and sharing. Lifecycle and sustainability assessments are common tools to convert data into decisions for greater circularity.
Recertification
Recertification offers assurances for reusing components and recycling materials. It can give insight into process quality, such as decommissioning steps, remaining useful life assessments and visual inspections, reliability testing, and steps taken to disassemble and either refurbish parts or enable high quality recycling.
This strategy is important for removing technical, financial and mental barriers for circular solutions. Moreover, it can support the creation of an international level playing field.
Disessembly
Disassembly is an important cross-cutting strategy to enable a range of circular economy solutions. Taking apart wind turbines and their components is a highly specialised activity.
Decisions on end-of-use pathways can be made before, during and after disassembly. Partial or full disassembly may be required, depending on whether components and parts will be repaired, reused, refurbished, remanufactured or recycled.
Consideration to disassembly at the design stage can substantially ease late-life processing, save costs and open opportunities to add more value.
B. Slowing the loop
Lifetime extension
Wind farms are usually built to run for 20–25 years. Operators need to decide whether to extend the lifetime of turbines or to repower or decommission the site. Lifetime extension means that wind turbines and assets are kept in use beyond the designed service life.
Decision-making for lifetime extension can be influenced by technical, economic, environmental and governance aspects. Legal requirements and standards vary per country. Usually, decisions require independent or assured checks for possible turbine faults and safe continued operation.
Lifetime extension can increase the value generated from existing investments into wind farms. At the same time, there may be additional costs for operation, maintenance and repair.
Maintain and repair
Repair and maintenance increase the lifetime of wind turbines and their components. Maintenance and repairs can be preventative, planned or ad hoc in response to faults.
Maintenance involves inspecting / regular servicing to ensure the continued functioning of wind turbines and assets. Repair can be part of maintenance, to restore (parts of) turbines after damage has occurred.
Modularisation
Modular design covers measures such as using common components across turbine models that can be easily reused and repaired; avoiding the use of irreversible joints between parts, especially when they have different lifetimes; and strengthening quality assurance, possibly with inclusion of quality-monitoring devices.
Modular design can ease disassembly and other circularity measures such as reuse and repair, reducing costs for new wind farms, O&M and end-of-use management. By enabling the , modularisation avoids the wastage of any remaining lifetime of components that are still safe to operate. Moreover, it can enable partial disassembly of turbines for upgrades to increase quality and performance, and to lower transport costs of otherwise more oversized loads.
Reuse
Wind turbines and components can be used again for the same function, which has been legally defined as “any operation by which products or components that are not waste are used again for the same purpose for which they were conceived”.
Many turbines are reused in entirety carefully decommissioned and rebuild in a new location. Wind turbines can also be reused for parts.
Before reuse, turbines and parts are inspected, for example to assess remaining useful life, and whether any repairs and replacements are necessary. They may be stored for some time, before being used again in a wind farm.
While reuse is often considered for wind turbines, it can also apply to the supply chain and supporting services.
Repower
Repowering extends the service life of wind farms, while replacing the wind turbines with larger models to increase the power generation capacity of the site.
Partial and full repowering are being distinguished. In partial repowering, some components such as foundations and towers are reused, while the rest of the turbine is replaced. In full repowering the whole turbine is replaced. The wind farm infrastructure can normally be reused.
While repowering with larger turbines is the most common, especially in locations with a high wind resource, there can be arguments to repower with turbines of the same or smaller size. This may be a consideration if there are concerns about the structural strength of foundations while wishing to postpone full site decommissioning.
Refurbish
Refurbishment leaves the overall structure of wind turbines and/or their major components intact, while parts are replaced and repaired if needed. Turbines and components can be upgraded in the process, and could even be designed from the start of the first lifecycle to accommodate for upgrades later on.
Refurbished parts are meant to last another lifecycle, thereby extending the lifetime of wind turbines and components. This reduces material use, energy expenditure, carbon emissions and costs for turbine manufacturing and wind farm maintenance. Moreover, with older parts often going out of production, refurbishment may be the only way to access replacements and keep turbines operational.
Remanufacture
Remanufacturing has been specified as industrial processes to return products to a like-new state, through activities that would commonly include the sorting, selecting, disassembly, cleaning, inspecting, and repairing, refurbishing or replacing of parts, ahead of reassembly and testing.
Remanufactured parts could function as good as new or better for multiple further lifecycles. The general benefits are comparable to refurbishment.
Repurpose
Repurposing refers to the structural reuse of wind turbine components for a different function than its original use.
Components can be repurposed in entirety or in parts. For example, turbine foundations can become water storage units on farms and turbine blade can be turned into playparks.
This strategy offers a lot of space for creativity . Furthermore, repurposing involves checking, measuring, cleaning, and potentially cutting components into the required sizes before turning it into a new product.
While it will not be possible to repurpose all components, this is a good strategy to generate value alongside recycling. Repurposing can also generate high social value in communities. Finally, structural reuse saves carbon emissions for products that would otherwise be manufactured from scratch.
C. Closing the loop
Recycling
Recycling has legally been specified in the European Waste Framework Directive as “any recovery operation by which waste materials are reprocessed into products, materials or substances whether for the original or other purposes”.
In principle, recycling involves the recovery of materials and their processing into new products. Recycling does not include energy recovery or the preparation of materials for fuels or backfilling.
Recycling can be achieved through mechanical, chemical, biological and thermal technologies, or a combination of those. Pre-processing steps may be required, such as disassembly, separation of materials and downsizing into smaller particles.
Urban mining
Urban mining, or landfill mining, is gaining in attention due to the potential to access valuable materials for renewables such as wind turbine manufacturing.
By re-mining landfills, materials can be recovered from “Anthropogenic Ores” – the industrial, municipal, metallurgical and mining wastes that people have placed in geological storage – accessing elements such as copper (e.g., for cables), cobalt (e.g., for energy storage) and vanadium (e.g., in alloy steel for towers).
Resources can be recovered with the use of bio-related technologies, enhancing the presence of naturally occurring microbes that can capture materials of interest with leaching technologies.
The added advantage from urban mining is that it helps to restore the environment. It clears away legacy wastes and mitigates risks due to landfill degradation, environmental change, pressure on land availability and resource scarcity.
Recovery
Recovery usually refers to the recovery of the energetic input invested into the preparation of materials, components and products. It can include the capturing of heat, gas and/or power, generally from thermal treatments such as incineration with energy recovery or pyrolysis. It may be possible to recover some materials from the ashes following thermal treatment.
Within a circular economy, energy recovery is less preferable due to the loss of the quantities and qualities of materials. Nevertheless, it can be part of a pragmatic set of solutions to safely treat wastes, reduce landfill and generate value from the recovered energy.
Within the wind industry, the co-processing of glass-fibre composites from wind turbine blades in cement kilns would primarily be considered as energy recovery. This is despite the replacement of clinker materials by the mineral fraction of the composite blades.
Decommissioning and site recovery
Decommissioning can be divided into three stages. First to prepare detailed plans and obtain necessary permits for the decommissioning. This is followed by operations to disconnect wind turbines from power transmission and to remove wind turbines, foundations and other assets. Finally, sites may need to be restored and monitored, aiming to return sites to a similar state as before the wind farm development.
The benefits of a circular economy for wind
Economically, circular approaches can improve efficiency, resilience and competitiveness. Increasing resource productivity – the value generated per unit of material – lowers energy generation and manufacturing costs. This is reinforced by reduced end‑of‑use management costs and lower decommissioning risks, with circular economy solutions opening valuable pathways for longer turbine and component use and greater recycling performance, thereby lowering unforeseen financial liabilities. Improved access to faster, more affordable replacement parts, including refurbished and remanufactured components for legacy turbine models, reduces downtime and operational risk for wind farm operators. Strengthened supply chains and greater resource security mitigate exposure to geopolitical instability, while new secondary markets for turbines, components and materials create additional revenue streams. These developments foster innovation, support new business models and market entrants, and strengthen the overall competitiveness, resilience and long-term health of the industry.
Socially, circularity delivers broader social value. It supports the creation of local skilled jobs, contributing to regional development and enabling a just transition. Moreover, greater certainty in timely access to affordable wind turbine parts supports continued progress towards renewable energy targets, which help to lower energy costs to consumers. Enabling responsible sourcing practices through circular supply chains helps to reduce risks such as child or forced labour in supply chains and support social acceptance of wind energy.
Environmentally, circular strategies reduce lifecycle impacts. By lowering demand for virgin materials and new components, they further cut carbon emissions and impacts on water quality, biodiversity and people while minimising the generation of waste. Innovations that reduce material use through efficient and durable turbine design, alongside solutions that enable lifetime extensions during the operational phase and materials recovery at the end of use, further raise environmental performance.