Recycling and recovery infrastructures for glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastic waste from wind energy industry: A European case study.

Establishing recycling and recovery infrastructures for innovative materials like high-performance composites is very challenging. For such materials, recycling and recovery infrastructures are not yet established, research on end-of-life treatment technologies is still in the development state, and secondary markets for recycled materials are still missing. Against this background, we provide an ex-ante analysis on the design of future cost-minimal recycling and recovery infrastructures for glass (GFRP) and carbon (CFRP) fiber reinforced plastic waste from rotor blades of wind power plants based on a mathematical optimization model. We present insights into future capacities and technologies for the recycling and recovery infrastructures within the EU-28. We systematically analyze the impacts of political regulations and of secondary markets on the design of these infrastructures. While future recycling of CFRP mainly depends on the development of secondary markets independent of political regulations, GFRP is mainly combusted in incineration plants or co-processed in cement clinker plants. Hence, political decision makers should focus on providing measures that support the development of secondary markets for recycled carbon fibers and provide incentives for co-processing of GFRP to overcome capacity limitations.

Estimation of glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastic waste from end-of-life rotor blades of wind power plants within the European Union.

The European Union is aiming at a circular economy and increased resource efficiency, which requires a waste management at the end-of-life of products. This is especially challenging for new and innovative products for which no recycling infrastructure exists so far. Wind power plants are such a product, for which large amounts of waste are expected within the next years as more and more plants reach their end-of-life. Especially the end-of-life rotor blades of wind power plants pose challenges with regard to waste management, since treatment options for the installed glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastics are still in a development stage. Moreover, material specific characteristics and technical aspects require separate treatment of these materials. To plan efficient treatment infrastructure, detailed knowledge on future waste streams is required. Against this background, this paper aims at estimating the mass of glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastic waste from rotor blades. To do so, we derive material specific weight functions and material specific shares to calculate the amount of installed glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastics in rotor blades. We apply normally distributed life times to project the calculated installed masses into the future and account for uncertainties within a simulation study. The estimation model is applied to a dataset of wind power plants within the European Union. Based on the considered dataset, we estimate that 570 [Mt] of fiber reinforced plastic waste will occur between 2020 and 2030 in the European Union of which 18 [Mt] are carbon fiber reinforced plastic waste.