SOLVING THE THROWAWAY PROBLEM OF AVIATION INTERNATIONAL CABIN WASTE

We are a group who collaborates to make recommendations and provide solutions based on relevant research & studies.

The statistics for addressing aviation sustainability are compelling and demand immediate and critical evaluation to put in place sustainability standards for our sector. The carbon footprint of our sector is significantly increased through every flight we take – just one return trip to New York generates 1.3 tonnes of carbon (source: Atmosfair) and requires each returning passenger to cycle everywhere for a year, and to go vegan, if they want to successfully offset their carbon contribution from this one return journey.

Food waste, packaging, print media, duty free, buy-on-board services and amenities collectively generate over 6,000,000 tonnes of waste a year . By far the majority goes to landfill and incineration due to a waste regulatory framework that is not fit for purpose and needs challenging and change to allow for safe waste recovery and increased circularity (Source: IATA Cabin Waste Handbook 2017).

If aviation recovers to the predicted growth pre-pandemic and doubles by 2030 there will be 8.58Bn passengers annually. If our sector does not successfully introduce strategies to reduce the carbon it generates from all its operational activity whilst other industries and transportation go further to meet their respective targets , aviation’s contribution to the total sweep of CO2 emissions could grow from 2% to 25% by 2050. (Source: Grantham Institute of Climate Change @ ASF Conference, Oct. 2019)  

Progress is being made in the development of more sustainable aircraft and Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) to ensure this statistic does not become a reality but for too long suppliers, caterers and airlines have developed and used new sustainable Inflight Services solutions to achieve a competitive advantage when positioning alternative products and services to their passengers rather than developing standardised best practices for all. Given the scale of the problem of cabin waste globally and the urgency of the climate change crisis this can no longer be viewed as acceptable practice.

As a collective force, the ASF is committed to bringing together companies and organisations from across the inflight services supply chain to collaborate by sharing knowledge and data and commissioning research to develop sustainable solutions and standards that are supported by our industries governing bodies and adopted by the entire aviation sector.

This will be a move from COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE to COLLABORATIVE ADVANTAGE for which we seek your engagement and timely assistance to ensure a sustainable future for the global inflight services sector.