Life Cycle Assessment of Inflight Services and Measures to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint

Abstract

Aviation is an important sector and one of the key contributors to today’s economy. With a forecasted annual growth rate of 4.4%, the sector is expected to expand even more in the coming years. This expansion is however followed by the environmental burdens aviation causes to the environment. Following the anticipated growth of the aviation industry, action to avoid the same trend in emissions is critical. Following the recent introduction of circularity in inflight services airlines are taking measures often labeled as sustainable, seeking ways to reduce their carbon footprint. It is important to evaluate whether these measures improve the environmental performance of inflight services or not. To achieve that, the cradle-to-grave approach of the Life Cycle Assessment
(LCA) method is recommended. Furthermore, there is little to no research on quantifying the overall climate impact of inflight services. This thesis is therefore aiming to fill this research gap by conducting an LCA on inflight services offered to passengers and the research question is formed as: “How do inflight services, and measures intending to reduce their climate impact, perform in terms of
carbon footprint and to what extent do they enable sustainability?”. Two baseline cases were evaluated to answer the research question, a short-haul, and a long-haul flight, representing conventional inflight service practices. For each case, five scenarios were constructed based on measures aiming to reduce the carbon footprint of inflight services, namely single-use plastic reduction, food waste reduction, lightweight materials introduction, carbon offsetting, and a combination of all the measures. The analysis aimed to quantify the impact
of inflight services, in terms of contribution to climate change, and compare the applied measures to the baseline cases, assessing whether they enable sustainability or not. Overall, the study can conclude that the evaluated inflight service measure scenarios performed better than the business-as-usual inflight service practices. The total carbon footprint of inflight services per passenger on a short-haul flight was calculated as 10.9 kg CO2-Eq and on a long-haul flight as 50.2 kg CO2-Eq. The combined measures carbon footprint reduction potential could reach the impressive 96% for a long-haul flight and 89% for a short-haul flight reduction. Most of this reduction is mainly attributed to carbon offsetting, 82% for the long-haul flight and 69% for the short-haul flight. The second best-performing scenario was the lightweight materials measure which could reduce carbon footprint by 13% and 19% for the long-haul and the short-haul flight respectively. Single-use plastic and food waste reduction measures did not exceed a 0.4% reduction of the impact. Although carbon emissions of inflight services entail a small fracture of the overall aviation carbon footprint, the studied measures can contribute to notable environmental impact reductions with immediate results.