Stu-Art Aviation Furniture started by accident after aircraft engineer Stu Abbott took an old aircraft seat and turned it into a chair for his house. The chair ended up being too big for the space he had, so he advertised it online and it sold within two hours. This prompted a flurry of enquiries about similar products and his business took off from there.
Abbott had seen first-hand the amount of waste from retired planes that goes to landfill. “As an aircraft engineer by trade, I had seen what was being thrown away. I thought it was a shame because I saw what could be done with it,” he says. He now runs his business alongside his day job, rescuing aircraft parts that were destined for the skip and turning them into unusual pieces of furniture for homes and offices.
Stu-Art’s products range from £35 business card holders made from aircraft seatbelt buckles to £5,000 tables fashioned out of aeroplane wings. Abbott is currently transforming part of the fuselage of an ex-Swiss International Airlines Avro RJ100 into a summer house, which he says will feature on the Channel 4 television show George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces later this year.
As the global aircraft fleet continues to grow, and planes owned by leasing companies are retired, the inventory of out-of-service aircraft is rising. According to the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association (AFRA), 12,000 aircraft will be retired over the next 20 years.
Abbott’s small-scale upcycling of unwanted aircraft parts, noble as it is, represents a tiny part of the solution to a much wider issue.
Air Salvage International is one of a handful of companies in the UK that specialise in the disassembly and responsible disposal of retired aircraft. “We’re dismantling aircraft, some of which are just nine years old,” says managing director, Mark Gregory. Often, the value of aircraft parts is more than the asset as a whole. Engines and other high-value parts are re-sold back into the supply chain, but new uses must be found for what remains.
Amy Bann, director of sustainable materials at Boeing Commercial Aircraft, says that about 600 passenger planes are retired each year globally - which represents 2.5% of the world’s fleet - and “nearly 90% of the content by weight is reused or recycled”.
Challenges and opportunities remain, however, when it comes to recycling cabin interiors and carbon fibre. Cabin interiors comprise many different materials which can be difficult to separate out, and carbon fibre cannot be melted down and reformed like aluminium.
One UK-based company believes it has the answer to the interiors problem. AIRA (Aircraft Interior Recycling Association) International has spent the last four years researching how the materials used inside the cabin – ranging from seats to lavatories to galleys and flooring – can be recycled when an airline decides it is time for an upgrade.
Tony Seville, director at AIRA, says the company is now ready to offer a full-service aircraft interiors recycling solution where “nothing goes to landfill”.
“We’re the first in the world to do this,” he says. “Everybody’s stuck with the same problem: ‘What do we do with these interiors?’”
AIRA is waiting to move in to the St Athan facility in Wales, where it will be able to offer a full interiors recycling service on site. St Athan is a Royal Air Force Base and is already home to an aircraft teardown company, eCube Solutions, which Seville says he is working closely with. He expects the facility to be up and running by the end of this year.
The next challenge will be convincing sceptical airlines to send their unwanted aircraft interiors to be recycled, as the concept is relatively new, says Seville.
AIRA has already secured one UK airline customer, which Seville says has “five shipsets of seats that they didn’t know where to go with”. The company is also working with aviation manufacturers to prevent waste plastic from factories going to landfill.
“It’s costing them a fortune to send this stuff to landfill. We offer a reduced cost and they get to wave their little green flags,” he says.
But a question mark still hangs over carbon fibre, which is difficult to recycle. Boeing uses a large amount of the composite material in newer models such as the 787 because it is a lighter weight alternative to aluminium.
“Boeing engages with a number of leading technology development entities to help enable a commercially viable carbon fibre recycling industry,” says Bann. “This includes ongoing technical trials with [UK-based] ELG Carbon Fibre.”
“We’re highly encouraged by our partners’ progress in this area and we’re optimistic commercial solutions at scale will be available in the coming years,” she says.
With carbon fibre accounting for almost half of the airframe on newer aircraft, there is a pressing need to find a recycling solution before aircraft reach retirement age.
There is huge opportunity for the industry to work together to devise sustainable air travel solutions - to meet today’s needs and those of future generations.
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