Airlines Waste Enough Aluminum to Build 58 New Jets Every Year

At sea level, you won’t catch me anywhere near anything with even a trace of high fructose corn syrup. I gave it up for my high school sophomore field hockey season and never went back.  But at a comfortable cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, there’s just something about a Sprite on the rocks that I just can’t resist. 

But what I don’t like is how I use that plastic cup for all of 15 minutes (any more time and I’m flirting with the 100% chance of knocking it off the traytable) and then it’s trash.  The aluminum can it came in faces the same fate.  Trash. Done. Finito. No reduce, reuse, recycle for this bad boy.  It’s headed to a landfill for all eternity with its buddies Empty “Grape Juice” Bottle and Airline “I Promise I’m Edible ” Food.

What’s really absurd is that airlines haven’t picked up on what a resource this waste stream is.  Planes and airports produce as much waste as the Aluminum, in particular, can be recycled over and over again into new, first-rate aluminum products (unlike plastic, which gets down-cycled into inferior products). 

In fact, according to an NRDC study, US airlines throw out enough aluminum every year to build 58 new 747 jets!  Every year the industry throws away enough resources to build a new fleet of planes!

It’s not just planes, it’s airports, too. In fact, airports that implement recycling programs are saving up to $100,000 a year. 

NRDC’s study finds that airport and airline recycling systems are largely underdeveloped, with even the best systems achieving recycling rates lower than the national recycling rate of 31 percent. If airports and airlines recycled as much as the average U.S. recycling rate, enough energy would be saved each year to power 20,000 U.S. households, and carbon emissions would be reduced by an amount equal to removing 80,000 cars from the road annually.5 Airports and airlines could achieve a recycling rate of 31 percent by capturing 70 percent of the discarded aluminum, newspaper, cardboard, maga- zines, office and mixed paper, PET plastic, and glass.

If we're not going to kick SUDs, the least we can do is use them to our advantage.