Scotland’s first commercial wind farm becomes the UK’s first to be fully recycled and reused

One of Britain’s earliest wind farms has been fully recycled and reused in a first for the UK, after an external review found that less than 0.1 per cent of the material from ScottishPower’s decommissioned Hagshaw Hill site was sent to landfill.

Hagshaw Hill in South Lanarkshire was Scotland’s first commercial wind farm when it began generating in 1995, with 26 turbines and a total capacity of 15.6 megawatts. ScottishPower took the original machines down in 2023 and has since replaced them with 14 more powerful turbines generating more than 79 megawatts, enough over a typical year to supply the equivalent of 57,000 homes.

Mott MacDonald, the consultancy that reviewed the project for ScottishPower, calculated that 20.4 per cent of the components were reused or retained as spare parts and 79.5 per cent were recycled, all of it within the UK.

Solving the blade problem

Much of a wind turbine is made from steel that can be readily recycled, but the blades are made from fibreglass and have historically been hard to dispose of sustainably. Images of old blades stacked in huge landfill sites in the United States have been an awkward spectacle for an industry that trades on its green credentials, and the European wind industry has made a voluntary commitment to stop sending blades to landfill.

The Hagshaw Hill blades sat in storage for a year and a half because of the lack of recycling options, before being sent last year to a new facility in Northern Ireland run by Plaswire, which has pioneered ways of recycling them. The company finished processing all of the blades earlier this year, according to its boss Andrew Billingsley.

Plaswire cuts the blades up inside a chamber that contains the waste dust, shreds them into pieces smaller than 1cm, then processes them at high temperature to blend them with recycled soft plastics, such as those from food wrappers. The end result is a polymer, in effect plastic reinforced with fibreglass, that can replace timber or concrete in products ranging from fenceposts to construction materials.

Costs for this first project have not been disclosed but are thought to have been relatively high. To cover them, Plaswire is paid by the wind farm to take the blades and then sells on the recycled materials. Billingsley said the company would turn over about £3 million this year and that he expected rapid growth, with a second recycling facility planned for Scotland that could create dozens of new jobs as rising volumes of blades arrive from wind farms reaching the end of their lives. “We need a lot of investment,” he told The Times. “We have to grow fast.”

A gigawatt coming down

Britain is only now starting to grapple with decommissioning wind turbines at scale as some of its first commercial sites reach the end of their operational lives. In many cases operators are seeking to repower sites, replacing obsolete first generation turbines with far bigger and more powerful models, and the fleet itself keeps growing: wind led the record renewable electricity generation recorded in the third quarter of 2025, while ministers push planning changes designed to accelerate onshore wind.

That points to a growing market for firms willing to enter the decommissioning supply chain. Gillian Noble, managing director of onshore origination and development at ScottishPower Renewables, said: “I have got a gigawatt of turbines that are due to come down over the next ten years. I am looking for solutions to facilitate that happening. We want to invite competition because that ensures that we keep the cost as low as possible.”

ScottishPower is hoping to encourage more companies into that supply chain, in the same way its wider UK investment programme has produced work for contractors such as the £110 million overhead line contract awarded to M Group.

Mark Crouch, head of decarbonisation at Mott MacDonald, said: “We have been able to evidence that the continued evolution of the wind energy sector maximises the value of resources, minimises carbon emissions and supports jobs in the local economy. The energy sector and companies in the supply chain can invest with confidence when they can see wind farms being approved for repowering.”

Friederike Andres, policy manager at the industry body RenewableUK, said: “The wind industry is strongly committed to sustainability from design to decommissioning. This is underpinned by legislation to ensure that wind farms are decommissioned in an environmentally responsible way.

“Turbine blades, which are typically made from glass fibre-reinforced composites, used to be the most challenging element to recycle. However, this has advanced rapidly with ongoing research and innovation in processing and repurposing them.”