Op-Ed: Airlines Need to Step Up Recycling

Editor's Note: The following op-ed was submitted by students Justice Bennett, Brendan Biles, Lily Wang and Sam Goldman. The eighth-graders wrote the essay for Christopher Columbus Awards in the gifted seminar class with teacher Heather McGovern. Their goal was to identify a problem and brainstorm a possible solution, namely, a potential recycling apparatus they dub the RAT3K.

Airline Recycling

And How It Has Yet to Get Off the Ground

Airline recycling is quite far from being green, and is not showing any sign of improvement in the near future. It is far from meeting the standards environmentalists and the people of America set for recycling. People every year pressure companies to take their business to the next level of green. However, the airline industry has been under the radar, so to speak. Very few airlines are actively improving their recycling programs to meet the rapidly rising standards of today. Green America evaluated the major global airlines and the best grade was a B-. That is awful because there was only one B- and there were five D’s and two F’s.

There are over twenty-eight thousand flights per day in America alone according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Of the twenty-eight thousand flights a day in America there is an average of a hundred and ten seats on the narrow body Boeing airplanes in the United States the most popular plane brand in America.  Of the hundred ten seats on average there will be only a hundred passengers that will use a plastic cup. Multiply that by the number of flights per day and there are 2,800,000 cups being used on airlines alone. If all the cups are lined up it could stretch across Pennsylvania everyday and then some. These numbers are a little big to grasp, but let’s say this; there are enough plastic cups thrown out on passenger planes to fill the Great Wall of China every 258 days, or fill the Taj Mahal four times every three days. A probable and possible solution to that problem is the RAT3K, an on-plane recycler.

The RAT3K (Recycling Airline Trash Three Thousand) is a portable, multi-use, wheeled device. It has three uses; trashing used napkins, dumping ice, and recycling plastic cups. The top of the RAT3K will be a container to dump the trash and left over ice, while the other side of the top will be knobbed to stack the used cups on. When the trash is dumped, there is a small compactor that will transfer the un-compacted trash to compacted trash, and compact plastic cups. If the cups can fit on a plane stacked, then they can fit on the plane after they are used if they stay stacked. The flight attendants on commercial airlines would roll the RAT3K down the aisle dumping the left over material in the cup into the trash and then stack the cup on the other knobbed side. It would conserve space in a landfill while also saving the time the flight attendants would be collecting trash.

In response to lousy airline recycling programs, it is a necessity that all people of the United States to be aware of this phenomenon. Anyone from frequent flyers to those who only fly once a year have the right to know how airlines are failing to meet the needs of new American recycling standards. The executives at major airlines need to be rapidly improving their recycling programs because they are only falling further and further behind. If humans are to sustain this Earth for many more years it is necessary to recycle as much as possible, and this is one major blemish on the face of recycling.