By Amit Kapoor and Meenakshi Ajith
Most of India’s conversation on circularity in clean energy has gathered around batteries and solar panels, and with reason, since the country imports all its lithium, cobalt and nickel and holds both sectors to producer-responsibility rules. Wind has stayed at the edge of that conversation, partly because it is the most mature part of India’s clean-tech economy, built over three decades into the world’s third-largest wind manufacturing base, and partly because 80% to 94% of a turbine by mass is steel, copper, aluminium and iron that existing scrap markets recover. Both facts have encouraged a belief that wind’s end of life will look after itself, and for towers and nacelles it largely does.
A blade, however, is glass or carbon fibre set in thermoset resin, built to bend through 20 to 25 years of monsoon winds and extremely hard to take apart once cured. India has no framework for blade disposal, no landfill ban and no producer responsibility for turbines, and its 2023 repowering policy leaves the scrap from replaced machines to general industrial waste rules. The Institute for Competitiveness, in its report on circularity in clean-tech, which models India’s wind-blade waste year by year and state by state, sets out how the problem will arrive. It follows every turbine from the factory, where part of each blade’s material is lost as scrap, to its twenty-first year, when the whole blade comes down, and assumes capacity reaches 100 GW by 2030 and keeps growing at that pace. On that basis India produces between 20,000 and 25,000 tonnes of blade waste a year until the mid-2030s, almost all of it off-cuts and rejects from blade factories, because no full generation of turbines retires before 2035-36.
Annual waste then more than quadruples in two years, peaking at 96,050 tonnes in 2036-37, when the 5.5 GW that developers rushed to commission in 2016-17, before feed-in tariffs gave way to reverse auctions, comes down at once. From 2038 it settles at between 43,000 and 53,000 tonnes a year, well above anything before the spike, as later installations retire in turn, and the cumulative total reaches 630,820 tonnes by 2040-41. Even that figure leaves out the turbines installed before 2015-16, the oldest in the fleet and the likeliest to be repowered first.
The geography is as uneven as the timing, with seven states holding over 99% of the installed base, led by Gujarat at 27.89% and Tamil Nadu at 21.65%. In 2036-37 Andhra Pradesh, sixth among the seven by capacity, produces 31,030 tonnes, 32.3% of the national total and more than Gujarat’s 25,110, because so much of its fleet went up in 2016-17. Waste tracks the year a turbine was built, so no two major states peak together, with Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan facing their worst year in 2035-36, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in 2036-37, Tamil Nadu in 2038-39 and Gujarat in 2039-40. Seen state by state, the two-year national crisis becomes a rolling five-year sequence of peaks.
That staggering allows processing capacity to be built in stages, so that a plant in the south could follow Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in 2036-37 with Tamil Nadu in 2038-39, and one in the west could move from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in 2035-36 to Gujarat in 2039-40, provided blades can cross state lines. Moving them would take a waste code for blades, a legal route between states and the means to cut them on site. Recyclers would have to know when feedstock will arrive, and as life extension stretches some cohorts and repowering pulls others forward, a national inventory of each blade’s age, maker and composite recipe is the first infrastructure they need. Gujarat, which also hosts 45% of India’s solar module manufacturing, is the natural site for facilities serving several waste streams.
The earliest feedstock is already inside the factories, where manufacturing scrap is clean, uniform and produced at known addresses. The planned production-linked incentive for wind components could make reporting and reducing that scrap a condition of support, while MNRE’s type certification could write decommissioning into blade specifications. Siemens Gamesa, which launched the first commercial recyclable blade in 2021, and LM Wind Power both make blades in India, and Adani New Industries is investing in recyclable materials. Sectional blades that travel in pieces, and a material passport telling recyclers what each blade contains, would lower the cost of every route that follows. Recovered composite costs more than virgin material, so it will need assured buyers, and two potential markets are close at hand. India’s more than 200 large cement kilns run alternative fuel and raw material programmes that can take shredded blades, burning the resin as fuel and absorbing the fibre into clinker, and each tonne co-processed cuts 110 kg of carbon dioxide and saves 461 kg of raw material. The right policy can ensure that blades that remain sound can become footbridges over irrigation canals, bus-stop shelters or highway noise barriers, given a standard integrity test.
Moving early would also protect a commercial position, because India’s factories build far more than the country installs and export turbines and blades to Australia, Brazil and Europe, where decommissioned blades are getting their own waste codes and an industry landfill ban took effect in January 2026. The turbines that will come down in 2036-37 are already standing, their sites and makers on record, and few waste problems arrive with that much notice, which leaves India a decade to decide where those 96,050 tonnes will go and to make its most mature clean-tech industry its first circular one.
(Amit Kapoor is Chair and Meenakshi Ajith is Development Policy Lead at Institute for Competitiveness.)
The article was published with The Sunday Guardian on November 1, 2026.
