Wyoming buried 1,124 wind turbine blades in a landfill, but a Missouri plant found a way to reuse 7,000 more old blades by turning them into cement feedstock and kiln fuel

Wyoming buried 1,124 wind turbine blades in a landfill outside Casper after cutting each one into three pieces. A Missouri plant near St Louis has since found another route, processing the same material into cement feedstock and kiln fuel at a rate of roughly 250 blades a month.

The two approaches sit at the centre of one of renewable energy's most discussed but least resolved problems: what to do with a wind turbine blade once it stops turning.

Why can't wind turbine blades be recycled normally?


A turbine blade is fibreglass bonded with epoxy, engineered to flex through decades of storm loading without cracking. That same property makes it nearly impossible to process through conventional recycling. Steel gets melted and copper gets stripped, but a cured composite cannot be broken down by heat in any economically viable way.

This is why cutting happens at the site where the turbine stood, usually with a diamond wire saw dragged slowly through the shell. A 150-foot blade weighs around 20,000 pounds even after sectioning. Each blade that arrived at the Casper Regional Landfill came in at roughly 120 feet and was cut into three 40-foot lengths before it could be moved or stacked.

Even nested inside each other, one blade fills around 44 cubic yards of trench space, roughly the equivalent of three cement mixer trucks.

Wyoming wind turbine landfill: What happened in Casper?

The Casper Regional Landfill took its first decommissioned blades in spring 2019. By the following September, the running total stood at 1,124 blades, arriving from three wind farms in the surrounding region. Workers lowered the sectioned pieces into trenches using a loader, nesting smaller sections inside larger ones to minimise the space each blade consumed.

The landfill route was not chosen for convenience alone. At the time, no commercially viable alternative existed at scale for blades of that size. The fibreglass and epoxy composite that makes a blade last 20 to 25 years of active service is the same reason it does not break down once buried.

Missouri cement plant turbine blades: How does the recycling work?

About 90 miles north of St Louis, in the Mississippi River town of Louisiana, Missouri, a plant has been taking in decommissioned blades from nearly every state since late 2020. It has processed close to 2,000 blades and handles roughly 250 more every month.

The process works because of what a blade is made of. More than 70 per cent of a blade's composition is silica, a primary raw material in cement production. Around three-quarters of each blade becomes cement feedstock. The remaining material burns inside the kiln and replaces coal as fuel.

Nothing is buried. Nothing goes to landfill.

Can wind turbine blades be used as bridges?

In County Cork, Ireland, two decommissioned blades were installed as a pedestrian bridge along a greenway built on an old railway bed. The span is around 16 feet. The blades came from smaller, older machines rather than the larger models now being erected across wind farms.

It was the second such bridge in the world. The first was installed in Poland a few months earlier.

A turbine blade is already a long hollow beam built to carry bending loads, which is the primary structural requirement of a footbridge. The Cork installation was modest in scale but demonstrated a direct structural reuse that requires no chemical processing.

How big is the wind turbine blade waste problem globally?

Researchers estimate the worldwide total of blade material heading for disposal at roughly 43 million tons by the middle of this century. Against that figure, a few thousand blades in a Wyoming trench and a few thousand more through a Missouri kiln represent the beginning of an answer rather than the answer itself.

The newest blades are being designed with their disposal in mind. Blades engineered to come apart chemically rather than resist all processing are already in operation on working turbines. That changes the scale of the problem thirty years from now. Until those machines reach the end of their working lives, trenches, kilns, and bridges are where the old blades are going.

(With TOI inputs)