By 2030, renewable Energy Sources (RES), and its infrastructures, are expected to increase 40% in Europe. Parts of RES strategies are onshore and offshore wind energy. The investment into new RES infrastructure implies an update of the current wind turbines, resulting in waste of the composite materials that constitute blades. To turn RES into the most promising and economically viable sources of renewable energy, we need to provide clean renewable energy without any emissions during operation. The blades, among the most important components in the wind turbines, made with composite, are currently regarded as unrecyclable. It is estimated that by 2050 the end-of-life (EOL) blades waste will generate more than 2 Mt annually, and cumulative blade waste in 2050 will lie between 21.4 Mt and 69.4 Mt, worldwide. EOL options for decommissioning wind turbine blades should be explored with the aim of providing environmentally favorable guidelines for managing wind turbine blade waste, and the possibility for material recovery and recycling is crucial if circular economy is the goal in the wind power sector. One possibility to avoid the accumulation of EOL blades in the environment is to convert the composite blades into new environmentally friendly building materials such as green cement. This option would demand some processing of the composite waste. Another option could be the reuse of the blades directly without much processing, e.g. . as new blades or as other products. Furthermore, the composite waste from blades could be combined with similar waste from other industrial sectors to enlarge the potential of a composite wind blade recycling process. Therefore, the general scope of the proposed project is to evaluate and demonstrate in large scale the possibility of recycling or resource recovery from blades and similar waste materials in a large consortium with some of Europe's key players in areas of importance for the project.

SUSTAINEXT is led by Natac and brings together 21 partners from Europe and Spain, 7 of them from the Extremadura region. The project will start in June 2023 and will last four and a half years. In summary, the technological objective of the project is to implement on an industrial scale a digital, dynamic, versatile, disruptive and multi-product biorefinery, with a processing capacity of 20,000 tonnes per year and following a NetZero Carbon strategy. This first-of-its-kind flagship will transform the plant-based ingredients sector, while showcasing and deploying a first-of its kind model likely to be replicable by the whole European bio-based industry. SUSTAINEXT aims to transform Natac's current production plant, located in Hervás in the north of Extremadura, into the most modern, digital, innovative and sustainable plant extracts factory in the world, placing the company and the region at the forefront of the sector at a global level. The model is based in the integration of the whole supply chain - from feedstock to end users - applying a disruptive circular model based on a smart dynamic analytical biorefinery (DYANA): a smart dynamic biorefining process for the cascade valorisation of feedstocks which is optimized batch-wise according to the initial composition of the feedstock to deliver maximum value with minimum environmental impact and ensure resource efficiency. DYANA will allow to achieve the complete valorisation of the processed feedstock with a zero-waste and zero-emissions ambition. SUSTAINEXT will be industrially deployed with six sustainably and locally sourced European feedstocks. Three medicinal and aromatic crops (rosemary, camomile, and lemon verbena) will be cultivated in Extremadura in disused tobacco fields as an alternative towards healthier crops, and also between solar panels (agrivoltaics) enhancing soil use. Three agro-industrial side streams (olive, artichoke/cardoon, and pomegranate) will showcase how biomass upcycling represents an opportunity to give a new life to certain underexploited bio-based feedstocks. SUSTAINEXT flagship will deliver 46 plant-based healthy extracts and functional ingredients out of which 13 are totally new on the market and 12 are newly produced in Europe. It will generate a revenue of 271 M€, will create more than 5,000 new green jobs (direct and indirect) and will have a decisive socioeconomic impact in Extremadura.