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Finnair flies toward recycling goal

Shifting to a molded pulp tray for foodservice, Finland’s airline expands recycling of inflight packaging, thanks to special process.

A new molded pulp tray is now used for serving food aboard flights of Finnair. The trays are being recycled as part of a pilot p
A new molded pulp tray is now used for serving food aboard flights of Finnair. The trays are being recycled as part of a pilot p

While financially strapped U.S. airlines may be abandoning inflight foodservice, one European airline, Finnair, is demonstrating how to take costs out of serving food and beverages to passengers, via recycling of the resulting waste.

Finnair Catering, an independent company of Finnair Corp., has long been interested in environmental management. The company, says Kristiina Asplund, manager of quality and environment, is believed to be the first airline catering company to receive ISO 14001 environmental certification two years ago. Late last year, Finnair Catering, headquartered near Helsinki’s aiport at Vantaa, partnered with Huhtamaki Packaging in a pilot program to recycle inflight foodservice packaging.

Finnair has been active in collection and recycling of inflight packaging for some time. But the conversion to the use of molded pulp food trays from Huhtamaki has added greater potential to the program. Previously, the airline used plastic reusable trays on some flights and no trays on others.

“As a part of environmental management system, we have separated the waste for many years, with the assistance of Finnair cabin crews,” Asplund says. “The collection of the molded pulp trays was one more step in the process to improve our environmental performance. With the help of Huhtamaki, the recycling of pulp trays was initiated sooner than planned.”

Because of European Community regulations, recycling of inflight materials is far more common in Europe than in the United States. In no small part, that’s because there is greater collection and separation of the packaging, leading to the creation of a material flow that can supply recycling operations.

Linking existing systems

In the case of the pulp trays, the innovation is in linking systems that were already in place, says Karri Koskela, group environmental manager for Huhtamaki. “Our idea is not to create competing recycling systems, nor to start doing any individual truck loading, because that would destroy the economics of recycling. So, instead, we benefit from the communal and municipal collection systems already in place.”

Another partner in the process is Corenso United, a company that operates a recycling system designed for liquid paper packaging like aseptic brick-style packaging. Corenso is a joint venture between papermakers Stora Enso and UPM-Kymmene.

As Koskela describes it, the Corenso mill in Varkaus was developed to separate the three materials from liquid paper packaging: aluminum foil and paper is recycled, while the polyethylene is separated and used to feed a gasification plant that provides heat to the facility.

“One of the primary reasons for this process is that the fiber used in both foodservice board and brick-style containers is one of the best quality fibers in the world,” Koskela points out. “So its quality and value is quite high. In fact, part of the material flow for this plant comes from liquid container waste from Germany. The value of the recycled fiber allows the process to accommodate the transportation costs.”

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