One of my newest stories to hit newsstands is all about how airports are greening their day-to-day operations. This story appears in the March 2008 issue of Executive Travel magazine, and some of its highlights include:
* Single-sort recycling at Maine’s Portland Jetport.
Working with EcoMaine, the state’s recycling company, passengers passing through this southern Maine airport needn’t worry about sorting their paper, plastic and metal into separate recycling bins. They can place them all in one of EcoMaine’s single-sort receptacles. Hey, the fact that you can recycle in a airport is great–I rarely see those telltale green or blue bins inside the terminal. But the fact that you can recycle via single sort in Portland’s airport is just awesome!
* Turning human food scraps into pig slop
Over in Germany, Munich Airport isn’t just tossing out food scraps as regular garbage. Instead, it ships this “waste” to nearby pig farms to be used as food. That’s no hog wash. (Many colleges and universities also ship food scraps to pig farms, as do supermarkets in Massachusetts.)
* Soaking up the sun’s power
If there’s one given about airports, it’s that there usually isn’t a lot of shady trees around, mostly because air traffic controllers and pilots need good sight distances for clear sailing. So it goes without saying that most airports are pretty sunny places and therefore ripe for harnessing the sun’s energy. One U.S. airport doing just that is San Francisco International Airport, which powers one of its terminals fully via solar energy.
* Composting at Sea-Tac
The Clean Airport Partnership recently took its hat off to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for its clever recycling of food waste from inside the terminal. This includes composting coffee grounds (important considering how much in love Seattle is with its coffee) and turning used cooking oil into bio-diesel fuel.
I’m wondering if any of the bio-diesel fuel used in the recent news-making Virgin Atlantic flight was from Seattle. Actually, it was from the Amazon–the region in South America, that is, not the gigantic online bookseller.
In case you didn’t hear, Virgin flew a 747 from London to Amsterdam as the first ever airline to use hybrid fuel. According to a Sustainable Life Media article, “One of the plane’s four fuel tanks contained a blend of 80% conventional jet fuel and 20% biofuel composed of coconut and babassu nut oils from the Amazonian rainforest.”
Other airlines are looking for ways to cut down on their greenhouse gas emissions while green ing their operations overall. These include; Continental Airlines, which employs 13 full-time environmentalists; and Southwest Airlines, which is investigating bio-diesel options like Virgin is.
How long until taxiing airplanes smell like yummy French fries?
READ LEAH ON HOME GOES STRONG
Long ago, when I was in college (and dinosaurs roamed the campus), I worked in the food service. We saved buckets of slop for a pig owned by one of the deans. Nowadays, the campus has a garden and makes compost from their food service waste.