This study presents a sustainable end-of-life (EoL) value chain scenario assessment framework for decommissioned wind turbine blades (WTBs) to address the challenge of increased volumes of WTBs reaching their EoL. Findings from the previous studies highlight that WTBs EoL scenarios and their upscaling are yet to be addressed environmentally and economically. The scenarios investigated herein are mechanical shredding, pyrolysis, and cement co-processing that can be industrially upscaled. Together with the industrial partners, end-of-life scenario value chains are identified, to assess their sustainability through material flow analysis (MFA), life cycle assessment (LCA), and techno-economic assessment (TEA). A prospective consequential LCA model is proposed for scenarios with different technology readiness levels (TRL) expected to be commercialized at different timeframes. IPCC’s Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) will be used to describe foreground and background systems in 2030, 2040, and 2050. More specifically, SSP1 (i.e., green road), SSP2 (i.e., middle road), and SSP5 (i.e., fossil-fueled development) will be employed and quantified based on integrated assessment models (IAM). Furthermore, environmental impacts, economic criteria, Social sustainability, and circularity cannot directly be compared to evaluate the scenarios. Thus, this research proposes multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to evaluate the three end-of-life scenario value chains considering a prospective scheme and addressing the key challenges related to the assessment of emerging technologies. Furthermore, a full conceptual framework of the methodology is presented.

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A model of the evolution of the onshore wind turbine blade mass installed in Denmark is proposed described by a Weibull distribution and the age of the blades is estimated from decommissioning data to t = 29 years when half of the blade mass of an installation year has been decommissioned. This is considerable longer than the 20 year design life time of onshore turbines, which is often assumed to be an estimate of the End-of-Life of turbine blades. Thus blade waste predictions using the simple assumption may predict that installed blade masses are entering recycling processes about 9 years sooner that what is observed in Denmark. The blade mass for decommissioning in Denmark is estimate to peak at 2000 ton/year and 5000 ton/year in 2028 and 2045 using the Weibull model.