Recycle abroad as well as at home, TravelMole guest comment by David Weston of the Travel Foundation

Consumers are becoming ‘greener’ in their homes and daily lives, and kerbside collections of paper, glass, plastic and cans are being offered by more and more councils in the UK, and used by more and more people each month. 

The travel industry is also fast recognising customers’ desire to be as ‘green’ on holiday as they like to be at home – and taking on board its own responsibility to improve its green credentials as an industry.

And there’s no reason why these good intentions should dissolve when the plane leaves the tarmac.   

The Travel Foundation believes this needs to happen not by coercion, but by information, and by removing the practical barriers that make it less easy to be as “green” on holiday as we like to be at home.

The average short-haul flight results in 40 kg of waste – sandwich wrappers, papers, cans etc consumed on board. In the UK’s biggest destination, Spain, this totals a massive 3,000 tonnes of inflight waste each year, most of which is dumped in landfill, or burned in incineration plants.

Strict EU rules on the handling of food-contaminated waste mean that recycling is not easy – but the Travel Foundation has announced the successful results from an innovative project run over the winter by First Choice Airways, Thomas Cook Airlines and AENA (the Spanish airports operator) to separately collect inflight waste, and recycle Aluminium drinks cans used on British holiday aircraft flying to Spain. 

Aluminium is very energy-intensive to produce (the energy saved by recycling one drink can is enough to run a television for three hours), and highly cost-effective to recycle: recycling saves 95% of the energy used in making Aluminium from Bauxite. It is the most valuable component of inflight waste, making its successful recycling highly practical, beneficial and cost-effective.

If the procedures undertaken by First Choice Airways and Thomas Cook Airlines were put in place on all UK flights to Spain, we estimate that 14 million drinks cans could be recycled, which if laid end to end would reach from Gatwick to Madrid.  

This would save 140 tonnes of aluminium – enough to build a Boeing 767 and a Boeing 747, save enough electricity to power 564 average homes for a year, and save enough electricity-generation CO2 to fly 2,164 people from Gatwick to Malaga and back.

These figures show the scale of the potential benefit here – just on one item (drinks cans) and in one destination (Spain).  Our trial project has proven how it can be done, and we have written a “how to” guide for the aviation industry based on it – now we call on all the other airlines to put it in action. 

With recycling, the sky’s not now the limit!