Sydney (TAN): Australian flagship carrier Qantas Airways has just flown its first zero waste flight.
The flight, operated between the Australian cities of Sydney and Adelaide, was the ‘first-ever commercial flight to produce no landfill waste’, the airline said. All inflight products will be recycled, reused or turned into compost. Cabin crew from Qantas ‘Green Team’ oversaw inflight service.
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Speaking on the occasion, Qantas Domestic Chief Executive Officer Andrew David said: “In the process of carrying over 50 million people every year, Qantas and Jetstar currently produce an amount of waste equivalent to 80 fully-laden Boeing 747 jumbo jets.”
The Sydney-Adelaide routes produces around 34 kilograms of waste per trip and 150 tonnes of waste annually.
“We want to give customers the same level of service they currently enjoy, but without the amount of waste that comes with it. This flight is about testing our products, refining the waste process and getting feedback from our customers,” he added.
Passengers used ‘digital boarding passes and electronic bag tags where possible’, while airline employees disposed of paper passes and tags sustainably. The airline’s lounges at Sydney Airport’s domestic terminal used multiple waste streams keeping in tune with the green initiative.
Sustainable alternatives to plastics were used on the flight such as fully compostable meal containers made from sugar cane and cutlery made from crop starch. Individually-packaged servings of milk and Vegemite were completely done away with. The measures prevented the use of about 1000 single-use plastic items. The cabin crew picked up the left-over items after the meal service and put them out for reuse, recycling or composting.
It was a trial flight for the airline that plans to reduce 100 million single-use plastics by the end of 2020, and cut 75 per cent of its waste by the end of 2021 as part of its ‘The Bowerbird Project’.
The project, named after the Australian bird that reuses small plastic items, will see Qantas and Jetstar substitute 45 million plastic cups, 30 million cutlery sets, 21 million coffee cups and 4 million headrest covers with sustainable alternatives.
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From the middle of this year, Qantas guests will earn 10 points for ‘every dollar spent offsetting their travel from Australia’, as an extension of its carbon offset scheme.
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