Southwest Airlines is introducing new bamboo cups for cold beverages and wooden stir sticks on all of its flights in a bid to reduce its reliance on single-use plastics. The airline believes that the new cups and stir sticks will help it beat its target of reducing single-use plastics by 50% by weight by 2025.
The bamboo cup does not, however, completely eliminate single-use plastics, as one of the challenges with paper cups is keeping them from disintegrating when used for cold beverages – especially ones that contain alcohol, which can ruin normal paper cups.
Southwest has landed on a more sustainable single-use cup that contains 93% non-plastic material but does have a polyethylene (PE) lining to keep the cups sturdy even when they have lots of hard liquor and ice inside.
The airline is also ditching plastic stir sticks for 100% Forest Stewardship Council-certified birch wood, which, thankfully, still retains Southwest’s Heart branding.
Given that Southwest Airlines offers pretty limited inflight service, there aren’t a huge number of things it can change to reduce its single-use plastics, and the airline soon realized that plastic cups and stir sticks were its two largest sources of single-use plastics.
Helen Giles, Southwest’s managing director of environmental sustainability, says the airline has been working on finding a solution to these two problems since the start of the year and only committed to rolling them out fleetwide after robust testing with customers and employees.
“We expect our new bamboo cold cup, wood stir stick, and other initiatives to exceed our goal to reduce plastics from inflight service by 50% by weight by 2025,” Giles said on Monday.
“We’re excited to continue collaborating with our suppliers to work toward our goal of fully eliminating, where feasible, single-use plastics from inflight service by 2030,” Giles added.
Along with the new bamboo cups and wood stir sticks, Southwest has already introduced a new paper wrap for its napkin packs, meaning that plastic has been completely eliminated from this service item.
In the coming months, Southwest will also introduce a new ‘select-a-snack’ offering on flights to and from Hawaii which is hoped will reduce single-use plastic consumption by as much as 18,000 pounds a year.
Matt’s take
I would be very surprised if Southwest doesn’t have to start seriously considering a ‘buy-on-board’ service at some point in the near future, and if and when that happens, that could really scupper the airline’s plans to almost completely eliminate single-use plastic consumption from inflight service.
Still, it’s nice to see an airline put some thought into its branding even as it significantly reduces its reliance on single-use plastics.
While Southwest has decided to stick with single-use cups, some airlines have been exploring the possibility of introducing reusable cups in Economy Class. Last week, Alaska Airlines announced that it had carried out a feasibility study on the use of reusable cups, while Delta Air Lines has also looked at the possibility of introducing reusable cups.
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