Highlighting the need to embed circular economy in low carbon infrastructure decommissioning: The case of offshore wind

Abstract

Development and deployment of low carbon infrastructure (LCI) is essential in a period of accelerated climate change. The deployment of LCI is, however, not taking place with any obvious long term or joined up thinking in respect of life-cycle material extraction, usage and recovery across technologies or otherwise. This proposition is demonstrated through empirical quantification of selected infrastructure and a review of decommissioning plans, as exemplified by offshore wind in the United Kingdom. There is wide acknowledgement that offshore wind and other LCI are dependant on the production and use of many composite and critical materials that can and regularly do inflict high impacts on the environment and society during their extraction and manufacturing. To optimise resource use from a whole system perspective, it is thus essential that the components of LCI and the materials they share and are comprised of, are designed with a circular economy in mind. As such, LCI must be designed for durability, reuse and remanufacturing, rather than committing them to sub-optimal waste management and energy recovery pathways. Beyond a promise to remove installed components, end-of-life decommissioning plans do not however provide any insight into a given operators’ awareness of the nuances of their proposed material management methods or indeed current or future management capacities. Decommissioning plans for offshore wind are at best formulaic and at worst perfunctory and provide no value to the growing movement toward a circular economy. At this time, millions of tonnes of composites, precious and rare earth materials are being extracted, processed and deployed in infrastructure with nothing in place that suggests that these materials can be sustainably recovered, managed and returned to productive use at the potential scales required to meet accelerating LCI deployment. Academic and industry literature, or lack thereof, suggest that this statement is largely reflected throughout LCI deployment and not just within the deployment of offshore wind in the UK.