Greening Austin Daily

Airline Recycling

16th August, 2010 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

I’m traveling back from Boston today, and I started thinking about airlines and recycling and how hard it is to recycle sometimes when you’re traveling.  I noticed though that today on my first Delta flight, the attendant said the stewards would be coming around to collect recyclables, which is the first time I have ever heard any mention of recycling on a plane.  Check out this Scientific American article from 2009 about airline and airport recycling. Here’s an excerpt:

The U.S. airline industry discards enough aluminum cans every year to build nearly 58 Boeing 747s and enough paper to fill a football field–size hole 230 feet deep—that’s 4,250 tons of aluminum and 72,250 tons of paper. The 30 largest airports in the country, with the help of the airlines, create enough waste to equal the trash produced by cities the size of Miami or Minneapolis.

Unlike other aspects of the travel business, the airline industry has moved at a snail’s pace to get onboard the green revolution. Although hotels, for instance, have plenty of monetary reasons to encourage patrons not to have their towels changed every day, the airline industry has little economic incentive and even less government pressure to go green.

Several factors have discouraged airlines and airports from following the nation’s recycling trends, says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). In December 2006 he published a report quantifying the waste from the industry and lambasting it for its lack of initiative toward recycling.

One of the problems is that airports have been reluctant to change their infrastructure to accommodate recyclable materials. Some airlines even separate the recyclables from the trash onboard the airplane, but if the airport is not equipped for recycling, it all goes into the same place. “Airports have been designed without recycling in mind,” Hershkowitz explains. “There are, for example, waste chutes that are all too convenient to dump trash. But there’s no chute for recycling.”

It will be interesting to see how the requirements for airline and airport recycling changes in the future – hopefully things will start to get better faster!

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