Landfill-free Qantas flight highlights plan to slash waste

Qantas has operated the first-ever commercial flight to produce no landfill as it highlighted plans to eliminate 75 percent of its waste by the end of 2021. Waving off the flight from Sydney Wednesday, Qantas Domestic chief executive Andrew David said Qantas and low-cost offshoot Jetstar currently produced an amount of waste equivalent to 80 fully-laden Boeing 747 jets a year. The move to cut waste, known as Project Bowerbird,  will see Qantas 100 million single-use plastic items removed over the next 18 months. READ: Dreamliners replace Qantas jumbos on Sydney-San Francisco. This will include 45 million plastic cups, 30 million cutlery sets, 21 million coffee cups and four million headrest covers. “We want to give customers the same level of service they currently enjoy, but without the amount of waste that comes with it,” David said. All the inflight products aboard Wednesday’s Sydney-to-Adelaide flight will be disposed of via compost, re-use of recycling. The flight would typically produce 34 kilograms of waste and the route produces about 150 tonnes annually, according to David. About 1000 single-use plastic items were substituted with sustainable alternatives or removed altogether from the flight, including individually-packaged servings of milk and Vegemite. Plastic cups were replaced with paper alternatives while food containers were made from sugar cane pulp left over from refineries. Cutlery was produced from starch sourced from crops that were not genetically modified. The items were collected by Qantas cabin crew for reuse, recycling or composting in multiple waste streams. Customers used digital boarding passes and electronic bag tags where possible, with staff on hand to make sure any paper passes and tags were disposed of sustainably. The Sydney-Adelaide flight was also carbon offset. Qantas offers the industry’s biggest carbon offset scheme and from mid-2019 will offer customers 10 frequent flyer points for every dollar spent offsetting their travel from Australia.