Day 23 Travel (part 2)

And we're home... 

All good things out come to an end. Today we flew home from Cairns.


One of the things that really stood out on the flight home was the volume of waste generated from one Jetstar flight. When the flight attendants collected the rubbish it looked like all the empty cans, cups, and plastic bottles ended up in the same rubbish bag. One small glimmer of hope was we think they may have been separating out newspapers and magazines on top hopefully for recycling.

According to the International Air Transport Association airline passengers generated 5.2m tonnes of waste in 2016. Most of this went straight to landfill or was incinerated. Disturbingly this figure is projected to double in the next 15 years (for the purpose of clarification this figure does include toilet waste).

Maybe it's not so much about the unwillingness of the Airlines? 

So here's what we've discovered. The amount of airline waste ending up in landfill each year may not be so much about the unwillingness of individual airlines. It may have more to do with:

• Quarantine regulations (for example in Australia international aircraft rubbish is classified as quarantine waste and must be disposed of accordingly)
• A lack of end of trip recycling facilities. For airlines to develop a comprehensive recycling programme they require (standard) reprocessing facilities at every airport they use. It's not feasible or practical for items from a previous flight to be transported back to a central processing facility.

That said some airlines do better than others here's a couple of positive examples:

• BA separate and recycle aluminium cans, but only on flights into London airports.
• United Airlines use compostable paper cups, and they collect and donate unused toiletry kits to homeless shelters.
• Qantas now recycle 12 tonnes of rubbish from domestic flights each month (we saw no evidence of this on Jetstar).

Close to home

Let us begin this section by stating up from that we have no particular affiliation or love of any one airline. However one of the more interesting Closed Loop case studies relates to its work with Qantas.

In 2010 Qantas worked with Closed Loop to examine the sustainability of products on 
its international flights. In August that year they completed a waste audit of international flights landing in Sydney. Here an overview of what they found:

• In the cabin: mostly water bottles and plastic wrap were left in seatback pockets and half of the amenity kits weren't used. By weight 59 percent of this waste could be recycled
• Waste from the meal carts: mostly food, unopened drinks and aluminium trays. By weight 23 percent of this waste could be recycled.

Immediate changes included how amenity kits were handed out, and removing aluminium trays for meals. In 2013/14 Qantas reduced waste sent to landfill by 20 percent (based on 2009/10 figures). These days Qantas cabin crew ask customers to help separate aluminium cans, plastic bottles, and newspapers for the cabin rubbish collection service, and each aircraft galley has dedicated recycling bins.

Some of our family's suggestions and ideas we'd love to share:

• Say no - if you don't need that toiletries bag, don't take it. If you have room pack your own comfy socks and a small light weight blanket or scarf (as both these items tend to be wrapped in single use plastic).
• If you really want to make sure your waste is recycled, especially on the return trip you could take your waste off the plane and deposit it in recycling bins at the airport, or take it home to compost.
• Please use airline and airport social media to support the good things you see and tell them how you feel about the increasing amount of waste.

Questions

Do you really think it is asking too much of passengers to help with some really basic sorting of recyclables? (e.g. Aluminium cans, plastic bottles and newspapers)

What great examples of airline (or airport) recycling or waste reduction have you seen?