Sitting inside the minimalist-chic interior of Nestle, you’d never guess it used to be a wind turbine.
From the outside, though, the tiny home’s former life is more apparent.
Nestle has a caravan-like aesthetic: a cream-coloured, elongated metal box topped with four solar panels and a single skylight.
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Inside, glass doors and windows at each end create a surprisingly light and airy space in the compact 35-square-meter (376-square-foot) pod.
Nestle — a loose homonym of “nacelle”, the part of a wind turbine containing its engine — is made from a decommissioned, 20-year-old V80 2MW turbine donated by Business of Wind, a Dutch company that purchases used turbines for reuse.
Marking the first time a nacelle has ever been used for housing, the Dutch building code-compliant home is an ambitious demonstration of the possibilities of upcycling, says Jos de Krieger, co-founder of Blade-Made, the company behind the project.
“This is basically the most complex thing that you can do with it,” Krieger — who is also a partner at Dutch architecture firm Superuse Studios, one of the home’s designers — said.
“So, all the other less complex things are now easier to imagine and to realise, because this has already been done.”
Amid a global boom in onshore and offshore wind farming, turbine waste is expected to accelerate in the coming decades.
Krieger hopes that projects like Nestle can provide an end-of-life alternative for decommissioned blades and nacelles.
“Everything in the built environment — everything that you see around you — has an end of life,” Krieger said.
“And we need solutions besides waste or landfill, incineration or something without value.”
“Changing that perception is really something that has to happen in the eyes of everyone,” he said, calling for “processes that create stories, instead of waste.”
Building with blades
While Nestle is Krieger’s most ambitious upcycling project to date, it’s not his first time working with turbine waste.
In 2008, one of his first projects as a then-intern at Superuse, involved transforming five decommissioned turbine blades into a children’s playground.
“The main challenge, in most cases, is that it has never been done before,” he said.
“So it’s innovation at its core, where you try to do something that nobody knows if it’s possible and what it takes to make it possible.”
Superuse, which dedicates its practice to sustainable and circular design, went on to pioneer more turbine-upcycling projects over the next 15 years.
The firm launched Blade-Made in 2021 as an initiative to take its design concepts to market.
Two years later, Krieger turned it into a separate company with Rotterdam-based design firm New Citizen Design.
Krieger describes Blade-Made as a “mediator” between the wind industry and the field of design. And Nestle, which debuted at the 2024 edition of Dutch Design Week, epitomises this collaborative cross-sector approach.
Commissioned by Swedish power company Vattenfall, the project involved the work of several companies, including structural support by IMd Consulting Engineers, interior design by Woodwave and Reliving, technical installations by Feenstra and design by Superuse.
Blade-Made has also transformed decommissioned turbine blades into a range of other structures, from benches to bus stops to street sculptures.
The size and weight of blades and nacelles make them difficult to transport and work with, “so we need simple ways to adapt and change it into something usable”, Krieger said.
A gathering storm
Wind turbines are increasingly vital to renewable energy infrastructure, with global wind power operating capacity reaching around 1,000 gigawatts in 2025 (for context, 1 gigawatt is enough to power 100 million LED lightbulbs).
Last year, they accounted for 8 per cent of global electricity production, a share that’s expected to grow to 14 per cent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
But as more wind power is installed, a new challenge is emerging: What to do with turbines after their 20-year or 25-year operational lifespan? While around 90 per cent of each turbine’s mass, excluding its foundations, can be recycled, blades and nacelles typically cannot, due to their complex structures and high fibreglass content.
“Unfortunately, blade recycling is technically challenging,” Justine Beauson, a development engineer at the Technical University of Denmark’s (DTU) Department of Wind and Energy Systems, said in a video interview.
“The nature of the material is difficult to process, and the component is actually just one piece. It’s not something that you can re-manufacture, like you would do with a washing machine, where you can take things apart.”
A lack of open-source data on blade composition further complicates recycling and upcycling efforts, she said.
The scale of the problem is growing.
In the US alone, wind blade waste could reach over 2.2 million tons by 2050, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and another study estimates that by 2033, around 200,000 tons of wind turbine blade waste will need to be disposed of globally each year.
But DTU’s Beauson notes that projections on waste volumes are often speculative, as there’s limited data on whether decommissioned turbines are disposed of, recycled or put back into service in other countries.
“The forecast of waste is almost impossible to make,” she said.
Many countries in Europe have now banned turbine parts from landfills, adding urgency to the search for waste solutions.
Last year, the US Department of Energy invested $5.1 million ($A7.8 million) in prizes for researchers developing cost-effective recycling technologies for wind energy systems.
And in 2021, renewable energy giant Siemens Gamesa developed the “world’s first” recyclable wind turbine blades, made with a resin that allows the materials to be separated at the end of their life, which were recently fitted across half of the turbines at one of the UK’s largest offshore windfarms.
Currently, Beauson doesn’t believe there is enough blade waste to sustain large-scale recycling operations. But this could be where repurposing solutions, like Blade-Made, prove valuable, as they require less specialised equipment than mechanical or thermal recycling, making them more accessible.
“You don’t need rocket science technology; you need to understand the material, you need knowledge about the structure of the blade, and you need to understand what you can and cannot do,” Beauson said.
The wind power industry is also beginning to explore “material passports”, which track all the materials used in a product through its lifecycle, to improve transparency and aid recyclers, Beauson said.
But while this could bolster upcycling, turbine manufacturers can be surprisingly reluctant to share detailed blade designs, even for outdated models, she said.
Krieger said that insufficient transparency is one of the biggest challenges his team faces. He likens the upcycling process to remodelling an old house: “You break open a wall and you find something that you did not expect.”
He called on manufacturers to publish more information on material composition, design sketches and strength testing records, particularly for models that are no longer made: “If that becomes more open source…that would help with repurposing solutions.”
Winds of change
Blade-Made’s latest project converts turbine blades into sound barriers used at the sides of highways. The 37-meter-long (121 feet), 5,600-kilogram (6.1 ton) blades can be used in their entirety, without needing to be cut into pieces, a process that requires a lot of energy.
According to Krieger, standard concrete sound barriers need steel or concrete foundations every 6 to 10 meters (19.7 to 32.8 feet), whereas the Blade Barrier uses a support structure every 25 meters (82 feet), which reduces carbon emissions and material use.
A prototype is currently being tested on a roadside in North-Brabant in the Netherlands.
Blade-Made’s projects have predominantly been completed in the Netherlands, but Krieger is eager to collaborate with clients and designers in other countries. He hopes to adapt his concepts to different geographies and regulatory requirements.
So far, the response to Nestle has been “overwhelming”, said Krieger, and the company is now in “early-stage preparations” to create its first run of around 10 micro homes, which will help “optimise production and make it fit-to-market”.
As more potential uses for the wind turbine parts are showcased, “the easier it will be to convince people, clients and wind farm owners that it is also an option for them”, he said.
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