German startup Voodin swaps fibreglass for wood turbine blades, aiming for 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 skyIn 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...