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EMR
evaluating recovery rates, for example, as well as how much carbon our processes and operations emit, and how emissions differ between secondary and virgin raw materials. By making this information available to our customers, they can glide through audits and share their own reporting.”
One recent example of how EMR has navigated complexity and change is in its wind turbine recycling.“ With no consistent practices for wind turbine recycling, we were fortunate to receive funding support from Innovate UK for the Re-Rewind project in 2023, which pioneered a circular economy for rare earth magnetic materials recovered from wind turbines,” Bill Firth, General Manager for Business Development explains.“ Our Re-Rewind partnership also enabled the development of our first dedicated wind turbine processing facility in Glasgow. This allows us to accept every part of a turbine where we can recover as many parts as possible for reuse whilst recycling other materials which previously had no scalable recycling option.
“ Wind turbines provide an excellent Material Bank where we can recover, reuse, remanufacture, and recycle valuable materials. As is our approach to all end-of-life processes, we apply circular pathways. These start with considering the whole turbine, and we have partnerships with several companies looking to reuse the turbine. We then move to component recovery, extracting everything from major items like generators and gearboxes to minor components, such as braking systems and control boards. This second pathway addresses demand for spare parts for existing turbines where the model has been discontinued, and in many cases, this could be the difference between continued function or early decommissioning.
“ The last pathway sees us recycle nacelle metals like high-quality steels, cast iron, aluminum, copper, and rare earths, which we segregate and process ready for
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