Pro surfer Josh Kerr makes world-first surfboard from recycled wind turbine blades

Recycled wind turbines have already been used to make shoes, amongst other things, and now they are being used to make surfboards.

At an event at Sydney’s Urbnsurf on Tuesday, attended by federal energy and climate minister Chris Bowen, Australian pro surfer Josh Kerr took to the waves on a new board built from recycled wind turbine blades, the result of a new partnership between his surfboard brand, Draft Surf, and Spanish energy giant Acciona Energía.

Acciona which earlier this month called for Australian partners to help it explore opportunities in turbine blade recycling, said an initial range of ten prototype boards was produced using material recycled from a decommissioned blade from its Waubra wind farm in Victoria.

The surfboards are crafted on the Gold Coast, with composite turbine blade material incorporated into the deck, the fins, and the outer shell.

“When Accions approached us about being part of the solution and working together to create these surfboards, we jumped at the opportunity,” said Kerr. “At its core, our brand is about enabling the best surfing experience with quality products, in a sustainable way – which aligns with Acciona’s vision.”

The new partnership is part of the company’s broader Turbine Made initiative, which is still seeking Australian partners.

Bowen said the surfboards, like the recycled shoes and other initiatives, is an example of what can be achieved.

“Around 90 per cent of what’s in a wind tower can be recycled,” Bowen said. “They can be shoes, they can be playground equipment, can be surfboards. So, when you see someone saying, what are we going to do with all the waste, we’re going to recycle the waste.”

As of 2023, 31 wind farms totaling 599 turbines across Australia were more than fifteen years old, putting them in mid-life, with most turbines functioning for around 20 to 30 years.

And while approximately 85 to 95 per cent of a wind turbine’s mass is recyclable using well-established techniques, the remaining five to 15 per cent of the turbines, including the blades, are made of composite materials that are more difficult to recycle.

Acciona alone has 2,100 MW of renewable projects in operation or under construction in Australia, and this includes what will be – for a while – the largest wind project in Australia, the 923 MW MacIntyre facility in Queensland.

Current techniques for turbine blade recycling include:

Mechanical recycling, which involves shearing the blade into smaller pieces for use in products like cement or plastics;

Thermal recycling or pyrolysis, which involves heating the blades in an anoxic environment, breaking it down so the fiberglass can be recovered and repurposed;

And chemical recycling or solvolysis, which works similarly to pyrolysis but uses chemical solvents instead of heat to break the composite material down.

This is not Acciona’s first unusual partnership. 

In Europe, the company has partnered with fashion brand El Ganso to design sneakers with soles made of recycled blade material. The former Queensland energy minister Mick de Brenni wore a pair of them at the Clean Energy Council conference in Brisbane last year.

The company has also used the same composite material to construct the torsion beams of solar trackers at a solar plant in Extremadura, Spain.

And in May last year the Government of Navarra, an autonomous community in Spain’s Basque Region, declared Aacciona’s Waste2Fiber plant, a planned turbine blade recycling facility, a “project of regional interest”.

The plant, which should be operational by 2026, will use pyrolysis to breakdown the composite materials in the blades without using combustion, and is set to process up to 6,000 tonnes of material per year.