Special Report
airline in Europe to move away from plastic packaging for its blankets, using instead a paper band sourced from sustainable forests and an ultra-biodegradable glue to hold the blanket together. This will reduce the amount of plastic bags being sent to landfill by 900,000 each year. Thomson Airways has also changed its soap, using 40,000 fewer plastic bottles a year, and is working with Freshorize investing in renewable energy projects to offset the carbon produced from making soap. Thomson Airways is also actively engaged with Swissport UK recycling all the boarding cards and paper from flight files that do not require three month filing. Swissport UK now, instead of binning at the boarding gate, collects the paper waste and returns it to the office for recycling, equating to approximately 1.5 million boarding cards a year. LSG Sky Chefs, its catering partner, is investing in waste management machinery such as bailers, compactors and water extraction equipment to help increase its recycling rates and support a ‘zero to landfill’ strategy. Cathay Pacific has been used as an example
of good practice when it comes to waste management. On flights, all food, newspapers and other waste is collected by the catering division CPCS; ensuring that in-flight magazines in good condition are packed for reuse, all paper waste is collected by a designated recycler, and beverage containers are recycled. Cutlery in economy
Green America Today
What Goes Up Must Come Down: The Sorry State of Recycling in the Airline Industry These are some of the staggering headlnes to come out of this report made by Green America Today: • In the U.S. alone, the airline industry generated 881 million tonnes of waste in 2008 • 50% of this was from flights • Nearly 75% of this waste is recyclable, but only 20% is actually recycled • Americans landfill enough aluminium cans every three months to rebuild the entire American commercial air fleet.
Some key findings from the report: • No airline recycles all of the major recyclables:
class is now also being reused and recycled. Cathay Pacific has raised awareness amongst their customers by outlining their environmental measures in their in-flight magazine. They have also removed the aluminium food containers on all ultra short-haul, and some short-haul flights, replacing them with reusable materials. While there is no current food waste recycling programme, Cathay Pacific has developed protocols that reduce the amount of food loaded on late night flights.
aluminium cans, plastic, glass and paper • No airline has a comprehensive programme for minimising onboard waste • No airline has a comprehensive programme for minimising or composting food waste • All airlines offer over-packaged snacks with wrappers that aren’t always recyclable. None of the airlines are working with manufacturers to reduce this waste • No airline provides good public information about its recycling programmes • No airline provides a regular report showing its progress, or lack of, towards its recycling goals
www.greenamericatoday.org
Why does this all matter? It matters because business relies on consumers, shoppers and in this case passengers. Corporate trust and reputation are in the spotlight more than ever. At Coca-Cola we say we require a “social licence to operate”, and “without sustainable communities we will not have a sustainable business”. Otherwise it is ‘mission creep’ towards loss of share and loss of industry sales from discretionary flights or from product purchases. And above all, it is uneconomic not to be more efficient when resources are becoming more scarce and more expensive.
What potential learnings are there from Coca-Cola’s strategy? In conjunction with the Carbon Trust, Coca-Cola has assessed the carbon footprint of some of its key products and ingredients in the UK. It turns out that the single largest carbon impact is the packaging, which remains true for aluminium cans, glass bottles and our PET plastic. The single largest carbon reduction opportunity
A Delta flight attendant recycling during a flight; Coca Cola ‘Big Ben’, made from recycled cans
is whether the packaging gets recycled or not. Using recycled content and encouraging the product to be recycled can decrease the carbon impact by 60%. Using recycled materials has about an 86% energy saving for aluminium and 63% for PET. Energy = money, and for airlines, packaging = weight, weight = fuel, fuel = cost. Coca-Cola’s packaging vision is to get back 100% of its packaging and use it again - Zero to
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