While the efforts to eliminate waste in how food and beverages are served dates back decades, it has been significantly more difficult to scale back plastic waste while up in the air.
Porcelain plates and real silverware are generally used in business class (and commonly associated with luxury along with an earlier and more romantic era of flying) but the large number of passengers and confined kitchen space for washing make non-disposable serving materials infeasible for the majority aboard the plane.
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That said, airlines have been competing to show how sustainable they are when it comes to the materials from which disposable utensils, food containers and cups are made. At the start of December, Delta Air Lines (DAL) -) announced that it is fully eliminating plastic cups on all of its flights — whether meant to hold coffee, soft drinks or alcohol, the new serving vessels on Delta will be a new cup made entirely of paper the prototype for which the airline has spent the last few years developing.
A cup that helps 'hot drinks stay hot and cold drinks stay cold'
"Cups that airlines use on board need to make sure hot drinks stay hot and cold drinks stay cold while holding up to the dissolving properties of alcohol," the airline said in announcing the change. "Additionally, the cups need to be stackable within the galley carts already in use on aircraft, and be able to separate easily so flight attendants can efficiently serve our customers."
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The airline has been testing the cups on select domestic coast-to-coast flights since Dec. 5 but has not yet committed to a date on which all of its flights will have the new cups. Along with several competing airlines, Delta had previously committed to fully eliminating single-use plastics by 2025 and claims that the cup switch will reduce its plastic waste by seven million pounds or the weight of 1,300 pickup trucks.
"One of the most important things about making long-term, sustainable changes is having the opportunity to test the new solutions and get real feedback from both our employees and our customers," Delta's Chief Sustainability Officer Amelia DeLuca said in a statement. "We constantly need to be testing, learning and iterating."
Airports, airlines all working to reduce plastic use among travelers
The efforts to ban plastic has also been trickling into what is sold on the ground at the airport — earlier this year, LAX joined San Francisco International Airport in requiring any water sold at the airport to come in cups or glasses, paper cartons or aluminum or glass bottles.
The phase-out period took more than two years and came with the installation of water fountains that travelers can use to refill bottles they brought to the airport (due to the TSA's longstanding liquid rules, the only option for those who want to do this is to bring the bottle in through security empty and then fill it with water afterwards) but the change does not apply to other drinks such as Coca-Cola (KO) -) or Pepsi (PEP) -) products which are sold in plastic bottles.
As more than 30 million passengers pass through LAX each year, this is one of the most far-reaching anti-plastic initiatives to date.
