Life cycle environmental impact and disposal strategy selection of wind turbine blades based on uncertainty analysis

The life cycle environmental impacts of wind turbine blades, crucial components of clean energy systems, require comprehensive assessment to guide sustainable waste management policies. Current evaluations often focus narrowly on disposal phases or single impact categories, leading to inconsistent conclusions due to divergent data sources and methodological approaches. Through an integrated life cycle assessment incorporating uncertainty analysis, this study establish that the manufacturing phase dominates the environmental footprint, contributing 44–99 % of total impacts across categories. Among end-of-life options, cement kiln co-processing yields the lowest climate impact, whereas pyrolysis and chemical recycling exhibit higher burdens. Sensitivity analysis identifies glass fiber and epoxy resin inputs as the dominant factors influencing environmental impacts across most scenarios, with benzyl alcohol consumption being the critical driver for chemical recycling. Threshold analysis further demonstrates that enhancing recyclate value can fundamentally shift environmental outcomes: certain technologies achieve net-negative impacts even under suboptimal conditions, while others require substantial yield or quality uplift to transition from environmentally detrimental to beneficial. Crucially, electricity decarbonization reshapes the relative performance landscape, with mechanical recycling and pyrolysis exhibiting heightened sensitivity due to their energy-intensive shredding and heating process. These findings underscore the necessity of prioritizing manufacturing innovations over end-of-life optimization alone. This study provides a robust, multi-criteria framework for policymakers and manufacturers to benchmark blade disposal technologies and strategically mitigate environmental impacts across the entire product life cycle.