Recycling wind turbine blades by breaking them down into their constituent chemicals

Epoxy resins used to produce wind turbine blades have been recycled using a method that can selectively break certain bonds, making the building blocks of these materials available to reuse again and again.¹ ‘This was considered too challenging until now, due to the chemical inertness of epoxy polymers,’ says Alexander Ahrens from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center at Aarhus University, Denmark. ‘Using a ruthenium-based catalyst, our method targets a specific C–O bond formed during the production of the resins.’ Epoxy composites are very robust, so they’re commonly found in a range of products like plane wings, cars and also wind turbine blades, but recycling isn’t easy, so these parts usually end up in landfills when their lifetime is over.