YacozA

BA offers wooden chopsticks on Far East flights, that are actually pretty good quality.

They wash well, and I use them at home for take-away.

Sealink

Easiest thing to start with is to make Highlife magazine a browsable PDF... although not sure how green accessing it is... (computer processing etc.)

LTN Phobia

Bamboo cutlery maybe? They grow like weeds...

flatlander

Bamboo isn't entirely good, because (as with almost everything else) you can harvest it unsustainably even if it grows quickly, and (as with most everything else) uncontrolled short-term resource exploitation in Asia means that happens. You have to be a bit careful where you source it from.

One major improvement to airline meals would be to create a single waste stream, by using compostable containers and cutlery. So then the economy tray would have on it some or all of: paper tray liner, compostable plastic tubs, compostable plastic lids, food waste, compostable cutlery, paper napkins, paper sachets of condiments, compostable plastic water bottle, etc. Collect waste off the tray in compostable bags. Keep the tray.

Some countries require incoming food and service waste to be incinerated, but even then there's some energy recovery to be done, and most flying in the world is not subject to this so it can all be composted.

I'm confident the passengers can screw this up by dropping other waste onto the tray, but that can be alleviated by post-collection processing to remove non compostable waste.

lost_in_translation

Sustainably grown wooden cutlery is probably the environmental decision here - the extra weight, and therefore fuel, of carrying around metal cutlery for everyone in non-premium cabins is surely a non-trivial amount!

Edit: I think the sustainable solution is actually just to provide sandwiches for every meal and ditch cutlery in non-premium cabins - there you go BA management, you can have that cost saving idea for free...

headingwest

I'm sure the extra weight is substantial, but I doubt it's a major problem. Other airlines (Japan Airlines and Qatar Airways for example) serve meals with metal cutlery in economy.

Your second suggestion I'm not even going to comment on!

Personally I see it as 3 issues here. Firstly the carbon footprint, which I admit is more of an issue with metal cutlery. But when you add the production and distribution aspect to the equation, I don't think metal is so bad. Secondly, the waste, this is where I do believe that metal would be better for obvious reasons. Thirdly of course, there is the actual quality of the product, using metal is stronger and IMO better. Of course for BA there's also the PR issue!

BertieBadger

I admit I was idly wondering about that. I don't have exact figures to hand, but a quick weigh of some all metal cutlery from the kitchen suggests 70 grams for a knife. Subjectively, it feels a little heftier than the BA metal ones and was definitely a bit larger, so we could perhaps estimate that with good design they could get the average item weight down to 50 grams.

If we also assume per earlier discussion that we have 8 items per pax, that's 400g extra each.

How many pax? 200? Seem a lot as many cabin configs don't hold that many in Y, but lets err on the side of pessimism and take that figure, so total of 400g x 200 = 80Kg, or just about one average Englishman (according to the ONS)

Now...that's very much all back of the envelope stuff, and what I hope someone can fill in is this - what does 80Kg more weight mean in terms of fuel costs?

simons1

Bit hard to call without knowing if the plastic cutlery goes into landfill somewhere or gets recycled.

Plastic doesn't sound very 'premium' but I must be honest it doesn't really trouble me either way. There does seem to be a decent eBay market for airline cutlery though....not sure why people would want to eat their Sunday roast with a BA cutlery set but I'm sure there are people on here who would argue it makes the beef taste better

flatlander

Bear in mind the carbon cost of producing cutlery, even compostable cutlery. Either making and processing PLA for compostable plastic, or cutting, transporting and shaping wood has carbon cost too. Unfortunately quite a lot of diesel, natural gas and coal gets burnt to power the manufacturing and transport industries (even if many wood processing factories are partially powered by burning wood scrap).

It's a bit of a tricky calculation all round.

T8191

BOAC knife, fork and spoon from a kitchen drawer seems to be 75 grams.

Make of that what you will

LoveHateRelationship

Guys I think we've given Alex and Willie a great idea... BoB cutlery!

bafan

Ok, i’ll Admit it - I wasn’t aware BA used plastic cutlery...

CKBA

Given the elbow room and the food served down the back a spork might be better - if made of titanium they're much lighter/stronger than plastic and reusable - and you would only need one of them if the meal was so 'designed'.

T8191

Is that not a Runcible Spoon, or is my memory failing?
We have a set, and very handy they are for sloppy food and curries

Ahh ... https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/de...runcible_spoon

airsurfer

Agree.
But then it should be light metal like aluminum or magnesium alloy, but OTOH, that is less resistant to dishwashing detergent.
The idea of wooden cutlery is not bad.
But cutlery is not the worst, but all the plastic packaging of the food is much more plastic waste.
And plastic waste should be almost completely banned as it is one of the worst pollutants.

I guess the total carbon footprint of production and transport of all disposable plastic packaging worldwide is more than all worldwide aviation.