Airports go green to cut emissions

Airports go green to cut emissions

Aviation’s carbon footprint spreads beyond the exhaust spewing from the engines of high-flying passenger jets.

It’s also the ground operations of airports — everything from the buses ferrying passengers to their planes, to the little car with flashing lights that guides aircraft to their parking places, the electricity that powers the machines that make pricey cappuccinos in food concourses and the garbage removal that keeps airports clean.

To put that into concrete terms, while the aviation sector is responsible for about 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas output, airports account for about 5 percent of the sector’s total.

Airports across Europe are trying to rein in their damage. The first airport to achieve carbon neutrality was Stockholm-Arlanda Airport in 2009. The biggest is Schiphol in the Netherlands, Europe’s third-busiest. London Gatwick joined the list in May, lifting the total number of carbon neutral airports in Europe to 27 — compared to four in Asia and one in North America. And Airports Council International Europe, an industry grouping, recently doubled its goal for carbon neutral airports by 2030 to 100.

Who’s doing what

Big, flashy projects get a lot of attention, but sustainability is often about making lots of small changes, “the not-so-interesting stuff,” said Mary Kerins, head of health, safety, environment and sustainability at the state-owned company that operates Dublin and Cork airports in Ireland.

In Dublin, the airport installed LED lighting, upgraded insulation, bought a fleet of 16 electric vehicles and launched a smart energy metering project to reduce energy demand. That led to a cut in primary energy consumption by 2 percent per year from 2012 to 2015, and carbon dioxide emissions fell by 33 percent in 2014 from a baseline of 36,917 tons in 2011. In 2015, carbon emissions increased by less than 1 percent though traffic rose by 15.4 percent.

Athens Airport spent €20 million on a solar farm that supplies about a fifth of its energy. Paris Charles de Gaulle and Keflavik airport in Iceland switched to geothermal energy.

“Acting to stymie climate change is also pressing for an industry for which bad weather can have acute financial implications through delayed or canceled flights.”

Like Dublin and Cork, a growing number of airports such as Bologna, Oslo, Trondheim, Zurich, Frankfurt and Paris are replacing the mainly diesel-powered buses and maintenance vehicles with electric, hybrid or gas-powered ones. Amsterdam Schiphol introduced 35 fully electric buses in 2015. Schiphol also electrified public bus transport to and from the airport and revised its taxi partnership. The airport is now served by a fleet of 167 zero-emission Tesla Model S cabs.

Manchester airport was the first in the U.K. to install low energy LED runway lights. The airport also buys all of its electricity from renewable sources and compensates for other emissions through carbon offsetting schemes. Collectively, these initiatives reduced annual emissions from 72,000 tons of CO2 in 2006 to zero in 2016, according to CEO Ken O’Toole.

London Gatwick last year opened a £3.8 million waste management plant, which disposes of food waste onsite and converts it into energy to heat the plant and one of the two terminals.

Gatwick considers “sustainability as critical to our future as a successful airport,” CEO Stewart Wingate said.

To intensify and market its members’ efforts, ACI Europe launched the Airport Carbon Accreditation program in 2009, which was gradually extended to the Asia-Pacific, Africa and North America. The independently administered program provides a common framework for reducing emissions.

Cutting carbon has obvious PR benefits at a time when everyone, from oil companies to investment funds, touts their green credentials. But acting to stymie climate change is also pressing for an industry for which bad weather can have acute financial implications through delayed or canceled flights.

“Climate change poses a significant risk to the airport industry — changes in rainfall, temperature variations, sea-level rise, changes in wind patterns — all of these have potentially severe implications for our industry,” said Augustin de Romanet, president of ACI Europe and CEO of the company that operates Paris’ airports.

Some criticism

NGOs aren’t as quick as airports to celebrate the work.

There are questions over the usefulness of carbon offsets, like those used by Manchester to cut its carbon footprint to nothing. “A recent European Commission study found that over 80 percent of offsets used in the [Emissions Trading System] had no identifiable climate impact,” said Bill Hemmings, aviation director at the NGO Transport & Environment.

And no matter the ground-level efforts, the vast majority of the sector’s emissions come from airplanes, not airports.

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Gatwick’s commitment extends only to the airport infrastructure and vehicles,” said Cait Hewitt, deputy director of U.K. campaign group Aviation Environment Federation. “The planes that fly out of Gatwick are still powered by fossil fuels and will remain so for decades to come.”

This article is part of a special report on sustainable aviation.


Original article derived from Politico.