With airlines feeling pressure to come off as more environmentally-forward than competitors, many have introduced changes around how they serve everything from food and drinks to toiletries.
American Airlines (AAL) once drew customer consternation over the choice to replace the makeup case that holds the toiletries that passengers receive in business class with a cardboard box, while Delta (DAL) and United (UAL) have both recently reworked the single-use plastic cups in which cold beverages have traditionally been served.
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New Southwest Items: ‘Bamboo cold cup, wood stir stick’
The latest airline to announce a new, more environmentally-friendly cup is Southwest Airlines (LUV) . The new version is made of 75% bamboo and 25% paper blend with a small polyethylene lining (this means that 93% of the cup will now be made of non-plastic materials).
The airline believes that such a wide-scale shift — almost every traveler will drink from a cup at some point during the trip — will help it bring down its waste of single-use plastics by more than 1.5 million pounds a year.
“We expect our new bamboo cold cup, wood stir stick, and other initiatives to exceed our goal to reduce plastics from in-flight service by 50% by weight by 2025, and we’re excited to continue collaborating with our suppliers to work toward our goal of fully eliminating, where feasible, single-use plastics from inflight service by 2030,” Southwest’s Managing Director of Environmental Sustainability Helen Giles said in a statement.
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For added style, both the cup and the stir stick will feature the iconic Southwest heart from the airline’s logo. Other changes include replacing current napkins with ones made of 100% post-consumer recycled materials and launching a choose-a-snack service on Southwest flights to and from Hawaii.
By giving passengers a choice of several local snacks, the airline expects to reduce food waste from travelers who grab what is given but then do not eat it.
“It’s been a year of work since we announced our Nonstop to Net Zero strategy, including our initiatives to tackle single-use plastics in our in-flight service,” Giles said further. “Today’s announcement celebrates the hard work and dedication of many Teams across Southwest to meet these goals.”
But while new cups or the choice of another different container makes for “look how environmentally friendly we are” headlines, the much bigger question plaguing the industry is the use of fossil fuels.
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An average Boeing 737 and 747 (BA) plane burns four liters of fuel for every second it spends in the air resulting in over 900 million metric tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere annually by commercial aviation globally.
While some discussions around transitioning to sustainable fuel are already underway, the long rage that planes need to fly and the large amount of energy needed means that the industry is likely to remain dependent on fossil fuels for years to come.
At a recent aviation conference in Amsterdam, JetBlue (JBLU) founder and current (BREZ) Airways CEO David Neeleman got into an argument with International Air Transportation Association (IATA) chief executive Willie Walsh when he said that sustainable fuels “do not really solve the problem” (ie. would be very expensive and inconvenient for airlines to shift away from).
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