German startup Voodin replaced fibreglass with laminated veneer lumber in 19.3-metre turbine blades; its new EU-backed factory targets fully recyclable blades at commercial scale
When you look at wind turbines the blades look larger than life. Like permanent, monumental objects that will turn forever above the same field, long after you are gone and someone else is looking up at them similarly. In reality, most wind turbine blades last only 20 to 25 years and when they stop spinning, roughly 85 to 90 per cent of the turbine can already be commercially recycled. But not the blades.Now, a German startup is working to change this with a material that has been here all this time: laminated veneer lumber, the same engineered wood found in structural beams. They are making blades from the wood rather than fibreglass.
A wooden blade up in the sky
In Breuna, Germany, a turbine sits in the small farming community near the city of Kassel. The manufacturer is Voodin Blade Technology, which in 2024 announced that it had mounted its 19.3-meter wooden blades on an existing turbine there, dubbing it the world’s first prototype installation of its kind. That is about 63 feet per blade, roughly the length of a city bus and a half, spinning in open farmland.The blades are made from thin layers of wood veneer bonded together, a material the company says recycles far better than composites at the end of life. Co-founder Jorge Castillo said the company had run “hundreds of laboratory tests during the past two years to perfect the blade material,” and that the blades are “even more durable than the existing fibreglass blades, as they show fewer fatigue characteristics.”The material at the centre of this buzz is laminated veneer lumber or LVL, a form of engineered wood that most Americans have walked past without knowing it. It is present in the structural beams of large buildings, manufactured by bonding multiple thin layers of wood under tightly controlled conditions. The company points to its strength, dimensional stability and load-bearing capacity as the reasons a renewable material can take on a job fibreglass has held for decades.Yet the blades need to have low weight, high stiffness and be able to survive decades of rain, ice and load cycles in the open. So the manufacturer uses automated CNC milling machines that cut complex 3D shapes directly from a digital file, with no moulds needed. Conventional blades are pressed in giant moulds, one per model, which are costly to build and lose their value the moment a turbine model is retired. That single detail changes the economics of prototyping entirely.The company states that its process involved 78% less carbon dioxide than conventional blade production, while cutting costs by up to 20%. But even a fraction of those gains would matter at industry scale. The disposal problem is already visible in the United States, where turbine blades have been buried in a Wyoming landfill.
No place for blades?
A 2017 study in the journal Waste Management estimated that about 43 million metric tons of blade waste will have accumulated worldwide by 2050
Most people assume wind turbines are clean machines that do the good work. The turbine itself truly is, according to the US Department of Energy, about 85 to 90 per cent of the turbine’s mass is made up of commercially recyclable materials, mainly steel and concrete of the tower and foundation.Blades form the sharp exception. They are made from fibreglass and carbon fibre bound with epoxy resin, which is difficult and expensive to break down. When they are done with their purpose, the blades are cut into pieces and buried or burned. A 2017 study in the journal Waste Management estimated that about 43 million metric tons of blade waste will have accumulated worldwide by 2050, with China holding 40 per cent, Europe 25 per cent and the United States 16 per cent.The fibreglass sits in the ground unchanged. A material chosen because it survives everything in the field turns out to never fully go away.
What comes next?
The manufacturer has said larger 60-meter and 80-meter blades are under development, while the installed prototype suits the onshore market that accounts for the large majority of wind capacity worldwide. Certification bodies and grid operators will need to sign off before wooden blades appear on commercial projects at scale. That process involves independent fatigue testing, load modelling and site-specific assessments, none of which is unusual for a new material entering a safety-critical industry.If all goes well, the blades could change much for everyone, the company, the industry and the climate.
