When you think about it, quite a lot of meal trays are discarded when flying. With so many passengers, who receive one and sometimes two meals per flight, plenty of rubbish is produced. Japan’s ANA is going to combat this with biodegradable meal trays.
This should save quite a lot of plastic waste. For example, when ANA introduced plastic free cutlery and straws, plastic use was reduced by a whopping 25 tons. Small changes lead to big results.
ANA’s Biodegradable Meal Trays
The new trays are produced from bagasse, which is apparently the waste fibre produced from processing sugarcane. This means that something that could be discarded is now being used, and it’s biodegradable as well. A win win all round.
Overall Thoughts
Along with other businesses, airlines are also trying to find solutions to become more sustainable. Whether this is looking at biofuels, reducing waste, or changing how things are done, everything is up for review, so we will see more of this in future.
Biodegradable meal trays is just one element of the story. Other airlines such as Rex in Australia have decided that the tray the meals are delivered on should be made of recyclable cardboard, rather than plastic. Virtually everything has potential to be changed out, which should make for some interesting times ahead.
What do you think of ANA introducing biodegradable meal trays? A good news story or not? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Paul Schmid via Wikimedia Commons.
This is great. I’d love to see other airlines do something similar. I wonder if there’s a problem with the new material absorbing moisture from the food and becoming soggy. I also wonder about cost.
Yes, I’d be curious on all those points. I doubt the new material would become soggy, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to be used, one would think. I’d also say it costs more, but since sustainability is such a thing and will continue to be, I think any premium would just have to be paid. The costs will reduce as more and more airlines do something similar.
I think it’s great. Some of the restaurants where I live have started using these biodegradable containers. During the lock-down I would sometimes order two or three meals for delivery and then eat them over the next couple of days. The containers held up fine – robust and didn’t get soggy. If there is a price difference I don’t think it can be too much because I didn’t notice a difference in the restaurant prices.
That’s good to hear, I would have expected that the containers would last, as any manufacturer would probably not be able to sell anything that fell apart quickly from usual use. Thanks for the comment!
I own a bar/restaurant so my interest is professional as well as personal. Like many people, I’m willing to spend more to be ecologically friendly but price differences have to be at least somewhat similar.
Yes, I think that is the main thing they have to do, keep the price pretty similar to existing products. A lot of it depends on scale, so hopefully where the prices are different now, they will eventually come down.