Reducing In-Flight Waste

Consider all the plastic you use when you get on a flight. First, there are the single-use plastic cups that you drink water or juice out of. Then there’s the food trays, often with individually packaged items, sides, and sauce packets. Add on the plastic-wrapped snacks the flight attendants pass around, or the plastic disposable airline headsets. 

Now think about where it all goes. Often, the half-full trays get dumped into a bin. Rarely is there time, infrastructure, or protocol to separate paper, plastic, and organic waste. 

It’s likely not something most passengers consider, with other priorities and worries at the front of mind when traveling, but in-flight waste is both an environmental liability and a business inefficiency for airlines. 

To combat in-flight waste, we must not only hold airlines accountable to invest in more environmentally-friendly materials and improve recycling programs, but also focus on changing human behavior. We need innovative ways to nudge how passengers consume and how crew manage waste—making the sustainable choice the easy, default choice. By understanding the psychological drivers behind in-flight waste, airlines can design interventions that reduce waste while also improving efficiency and the passenger experience.