Wind turbines are necessary for ensuring society’s sustainable future, but they still have a recycling problem. Decommissioned installations are destined for landfills in many cases, while the steel parts that actually make it to recycling facilities are only broken down after generating large amounts of (often dirty) greenhouse gas emissions. Two Dutch companies, however, recently proposed new ways to repurpose a wind turbine’s physically largest and most cumbersome pieces into tiny houses, boats, and more.
From October 19 to October 27 at Dutch Design Week 2024, Vattenfall and the design studio Superuse are showcasing a roughly 393-sq-ft home built inside a retired nacelle—the topmost, steel-encased part of a wind turbine containing its generating components such as the generator itself, gearbox, brake train, and drive mechanisms. After hollowing the nacelle of its original internal parts, the team used the casing for a prototype that now features a living space, bathroom, and kitchen with amenities like solar-powered electricity and water heating, as well as a heat pump instead of encasing turbine parts.
Portions of the home interior were also constructed from recycled wind turbine components. Credit: Vattenfall / Jorrit Lousberg Jorrit Lousberg
“We are looking for innovative ways in which you can reuse materials from used turbines… [which necessitates] making something new from them with as few modifications as possible,” Thomas Hjort, Vattenfall’s director of innovation, said in a statement. “That saves raw materials [and] energy consumption, and in this way we ensure that these materials are useful for many years after their first working life.”
Superuse didn’t take the easiest route to the new house. The team—with help from sustainable designing firms Blade-Made and Woodwave—reportedly picked the smallest possible nacelle to construct a building code-compliant dwelling instead of selecting a larger, modern nacelle for the project that would have provided more room for installing electrical wiring and appliances. In this case, the model home uses a V80 2mW turbine’s nacelle. But more recent designs are often much roomier than the 20-year-old V80’s source material, meaning future iterations could provide even more space for inhabitants.
An artists’s conceptualization of an entire community space incorporating recycled wind turbine components. Credit: Courtesy of Vattenfall
The project designers estimate that at least 10,000 V80 turbine nacelles currently exist around the world, most of which are still in operation. That will change in the coming years, however, as global wind energy demands increase and more advanced turbines are installed to fulfill those needs.
“If such a complex structure as a house is possible, then numerous simpler solutions are also feasible and scalable,” argued Jos de Krieger, a partner of Superuse and Blade-Made.
And to make their point, Vattenfall recently offered another example of upcycled turbine parts. Earlier this month, the company also revealed that prototype tests indicate comparatively small turbine blades can be made buoyant with a few modifications. Once properly sealed and reinforced, architects Sonja Draskovic and Jasper Manders topped their 90-foot test blade with green astroturf, an enclosed one-room dwelling, as well as a picket fence and lawn table to demonstrate one use case. And the potential uses for these miniature artificial islands may not end there.
“[W]e started thinking, what can we do with this new land?” Draskovic said in a statement. “Solar parks, playgrounds, houses: anything is possible.”
Other potential uses for wind turbine blades include floating solar farms, traffic noise barriers, and boat houses. Vattenfall / Jorrit Lousberg Jorrit Lousberg
Draskovic and collaborators noted that, like the nacelle home, the blade they used is one of the smallest currently available. More recent designs are nearly 328-feet-long, which may present challenges in future float tests. But blade repurposing doesn’t need to stick to the seas. Aside from boats, designers believe decommissioned turbine blades or their smaller parts may find their way into traffic noise barriers or parking garages.
It will likely take a combination of reuses to fully complete a wind turbine’s circular life cycle, while especially problematic components such as their rare earth element-laden batteries require additional consideration and solutions. Meanwhile, the design teams still need to perform additional experiments and alterations on both the tiny home and boat before scaling them for wider use. Still, the recycling prompts have already inspired people like Vattenhall’s director of innovation to look to the future for additional recycling possibilities.
“With this design, I no longer see images of wind turbine blades that we bury underground like bulky waste,” Thomas said.
Human echolocation has at times allowed people to ride bikes or play basketball despite being completely blind from a very young age. These echolocators typically perceive their environment by clicking sharply with their tongues and listening to differences in the sounds reflected off objects.
Brain-imaging studies reveal that expert echolocators display responses to sound in their brain’s primary visual region, and researchers have speculated that long-term input deprivation could lead to visual regions being repurposed. “There’s been this strong tradition to think of the blind brain as different, that it’s necessary to have gone through that sensory loss to have this neuroplasticity,” says Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at Durham University in England.
Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people could learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training. For more recent work in the journal Cerebral Cortex, she and her colleagues examined the brain changes underlying these abilities. After training, both blind and sighted people displayed responses to echoes in their visual cortex, a finding that challenges the belief that primary sensory regions are wholly sense-specific.
The researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 blind people for between two and three hours twice a week over 10 weeks. They started by teaching participants to produce mouth clicks, then trained them on three tasks. The first two involved judging the size or orientation of objects. The third involved navigating virtual mazes, which participants moved through with the help of simulated click-plus-echo sounds tied to their positions.
Both groups improved on all the tasks. “This study adds a significant contribution to a growing body of evidence that this is a trainable, nonexotic skill that’s available to both blind and sighted people,” says Santani Teng, a psychologist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, who studies echolocation and braille.
During brain scans before and after training, participants also performed a task that involved recognizing mazes, with and without click echoes. After training, both groups showed increased auditory cortex activation in response to sound in general, as well as higher gray matter density in auditory areas.
Most surprisingly, after training, both blind and sighted participants also showed visual cortex activation in response to audible echoes. “We weren’t sure if we would get this result in sighted people, so it was really rewarding to see it,” Thaler says. She suspects that rather than just processing visual data, this brain area takes in information from varied senses that aid spatial understanding.
Three months after the 2021 study, a follow-up survey found that 83 percent of blind participants who had learned echolocation reported improvements in independence and well-being. The researchers are working on disseminating the training more widely, Thaler says: “It’s a powerful sensory tool for people with vision impairments.”
