Image inspiration - Man Ray - link
Emirates recently announced that it had recycled more than 88 tonnes of redundant plastic meal trays, bowls and dishes from its Economy Class service over the past year. It's an impressive number, but perhaps the more interesting story isn't the airline, it's the company taking the old trays away and bringing them back.
Belgian headquartered deSter designs and manufactures food service products for more than 80 airlines worldwide. Increasingly, however, it isn't simply designing the product, it's trying to design what happens to it at the end of its useful life and that's where this becomes interesting from a waste management perspective.The elephant in the departure lounge
Before getting too enthusiastic, there's an obvious point to acknowledge. Aviation is hardly an environmental poster child. Commercial aircraft consume enormous quantities of fuel, generate significant greenhouse gas emissions and aviation remains one of the more difficult sectors of the global economy to decarbonise. Recycling a meal tray doesn't cancel any of that out, nor should an airline be considered environmentally sustainable simply because somebody has found a better way of dealing with its crockery but that would be missing the point.
An industry's wider environmental impact isn't an argument for ignoring the impacts it can reduce. If humans are going to continue flying and every indication suggests that we are – repeatedly reusing products and recovering their constituent materials at end-of-life is surely preferable to continually manufacturing replacements from virgin resources.
Aviation's environmental footprint is an argument for doing more, not an argument for dismissing the things it gets right and in this particular case, something is being done exceptionally well.
Recycling isn't necessarily circular
Industry has become very comfortable, perhaps even complacent with the idea of recycling. Put something in the correct container, send it to a recycling facility and receive a report stating that it's been recycled - job done - except, of course, that isn't necessarily a circular economy.
Successful recycling ultimately requires three things: a recoverable and sufficiently consistent material, viable reprocessing and somebody willing to buy and use the resulting secondary raw material.
deSter's approach attempts to connect all three. Its reusable airline serviceware can reportedly withstand at least 150 uses and then only when an item becomes damaged or otherwise unserviceable does the recycling stage begin. The redundant products are collected, washed and inspected before being ground into material that can then be incorporated into new serviceware with those replacement products being supplied back to the airline - tray becomes tray - bowl becomes bowl.
The customer consuming the product effectively becomes the supplier of raw material for its replacement which is a considerably more interesting proposition than simply saying something is recyclable and it's harder than it sounds because these aren't old plastic trays being turned into traffic cones or park benches, they're being returned to food contact applications and that requires considerably greater control over material provenance, contamination, traceability and processing.
deSter began developing its aviation closed-loop system around 2018 and in 2021 announced approval from the European Food Safety Authority for its food-contact closed-loop recycling process. Its reusable product range includes polypropylene (PP), bio-PP and PET, although the precise polymer used varies between individual products and airline programmes. Replacement products typically contain around 25% recycled material, meaning virgin polymer is still required which is worth acknowledging as this isn't an infinitely self-sustaining loop in which yesterday's tray becomes 100% of tomorrow's tray.
Material performance, food-contact requirements and manufacturing specifications impose limitations - the important development is that recovered material is being deliberately specified as feedstock for replacement products.
Emirates provides an excellent demonstration of scale. Its closed loop programme, launched in 2023 and now reportedly recovers damaged Economy Class trays, casseroles, snack dishes and bowls for processing in Dubai. More than 88,000 kilograms were repurposed during the reported year, with new products containing up to 25% recycled material, but Emirates is only part of the story; KLM was working with deSter on closed-loop airline catering products as far back as 2019; Cathay Pacific has reported returning more than 47,000 damaged or substandard Economy Class trays, which were broken down, processed and injection-moulded into new trays containing approximately 25% recycled material; Etihad introduced a reusable Economy Class dining system designed so that trays, dishes, bowls, lids and platters can eventually be recovered, ground and incorporated into replacement products; TAP Air Portugal introduced similar reusable closed-loop tableware on long-haul Economy services, reportedly on a cost-neutral basis.
deSter's sustainability reporting has identified five airlines across three continents participating in its established closed-loop programmes: Emirates, Etihad, KLM, Cathay Pacific and TAP Air Portugal, others are beginning to design products around similar principles.
Keeping the loop local
Sending redundant plastic thousands of miles around the world simply to recycle it would rather undermine the exercise; deSter therefore operates manufacturing and processing infrastructure across several regions. Its European closed loop activity has centred on its manufacturing operation in Hoogstraten, Belgium, while Asian material can be handled through its operation in Prachinburi, Thailand. For Emirates, redundant serviceware is processed locally in Dubai, with deSter operating from the Jebel Ali area.
This geographical element matters. Circularity isn't simply about where a material eventually ends up. Transport, handling and processing are part of its environmental footprint too. A genuinely effective loop should therefore be as short geographically as it is circular materially.
Five airlines down. Quite a few to go.
And this is where praise needs to turn into a question. deSter says it supplies more than 80 airlines worldwide but its published sustainability reporting identifies only five airline partners operating established closed loop recycling programmes. Meanwhile, IATA's global statistical collection draws information from more than 1,300 airlines.
Those figures aren't directly comparable; deSter is only one supplier and airlines vary enormously in size and operation so it would be misleading of me to suggest that only a tiny percentage of aviation uses closed loop serviceware but they do illustrate the size of the opportunity because deSter and its airline partners have already answered several important questions.
Why isn't it being done much more widely?
Perhaps the bin is where we've been going wrong. Throughout all of my time in the industry, waste management has concentrated on what happens after somebody decides something is waste. We manufacture a product, sell it, use it and eventually throw it away and only then do we ask - what can we do with this?
Closed-loop thinking reverses that sequence. Before manufacturing the product, ask: what will happen when the customer has finished with it? Even better - how do we make sure we get the material back?
Airlines actually provide an unusually good environment in which to answer these questions.
Unlike takeaway packaging disappearing into millions of homes and workplaces, airline serviceware operates within a relatively controlled system. The airline specifies it initially, the catering operation supplies it, the passenger uses it, cabin crew collect it and then the catering operation receives it back. The material never completely escapes the supply chain and once you'e recognised that, designing a recovery loop becomes considerably more achievable.
The challenge now is to make the exception considerably less exceptional because perhaps the best recycling system isn't the one that finds somewhere for our waste to go, it's the one that already knows how it's coming back. deSter - link - more like this (aviation) - link - more like this (Emirates) - link - more like this (KLM) - link - more like this (plastic recycling) - link
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