Facilitating Heathrow’s shift to a circularity-first approach around waste and resource use

Heathrow airport – the UK’s international gateway and the most connected airport in the world – has taken a major step towards achieving its waste reduction ambitions with the completion of a comprehensive multi-year waste and recycling data collection programme that informs its efforts to achieve a 70% operational recycling rate by 2035.

The UK’s ‘Jet Zero’ strategy for aviation aims to drastically reduce the carbon footprint of aviation, which is a major contributor to national and global carbon emissions. As part of its efforts towards achieving this goal, Heathrow has stated its ambition to achieve a 10% total reduction in its overall operational waste arisings (currently 22,000 tonnes per year) over the next decade, along with ensuring 95% of its construction and demolition waste is reused, recycled or recovered.

Decarbonising ‘a small city’

The challenge facing large international airports in reducing on-the-ground emissions is daunting, with the physical footprint of the airport estate described by the operator as ‘akin to a small city’. To improve the efficiency of its waste and recycling operations, the airport needs to find whole system solutions, working closely with partners and stakeholders across its entire operation (including airlines, retailers, suppliers and contractors).

Real change takes time to have an effect and, the longer it takes to act, the harder it will be to achieve net zero. Realistically, for all passengers and cargo to fly as close to net zero as possible by 2050, new approaches need to be identified and implemented rapidly.

Understanding operational waste

Delivered by Resource Futures’ data gathering experts in two parts across consecutive years, the study investigated the Heathrow’s residual waste and recycling performance, a comprehensive multi-year waste and recycling data collection programme

This covered both the airport’s landside (pre-security) and airside (post-security) operations. The 2023 element of the study saw a representative sample of 34.9 metric tonnes sorted (57% waste; 42% recycling) while the 2024 follow-up analysis analysed a further 25.5 tonnes (62% waste; 38% recycling).

Turning waste into recycling

The data by Resource Futures revealed that more than 30% of what is being thrown into general waste had the potential to be recycled, a figure that increased slightly year-on-year.

The study looked at waste and recycling collection across both ‘landside’ and ‘airside’ operations

Adding in recycling for food waste and plastic film (both collection requirements under the new Simpler Recycling rules), along with e-waste and textiles, could lead to nearly two-thirds of general waste being recycled instead, potentially turning up to 58% of the current residual processing costs into recycling savings.

Preventing recycling spoilage

While increasing recycling opportunities is a perennial priority, getting people to place items into the correct bin is an ongoing issue. The 2024 data showed that fewer than half (47.2%) of the materials being placed into recycling bins could be recycled because of material contamination.

What is recycling contamination?

Recycling contamination refers to the presence of non-recyclable materials or recyclable items stained with food residue or other substances (such as greasy pizza boxes) being added to recycling bins. The presence of contaminated materials not only make the recycling process more inefficient and costly – they can also contaminate entire batches of recyclable materials, making them also unsuitable for recycling.

This problem was more challenging across landside operations, with nearly two-thirds of materials being affected by contamination. The materials that most commonly land in the wrong bins – liquid drinks, food waste, and non-recyclable paper and card – present the biggest opportunity for savings; for example, having airport visitors pour out liquids before recycling drink containers could bring down processing costs by up to 15%.

Prompting more mindful recycling behaviours

Travellers preoccupied with the next steps of their journeys (navigating check-in, security, passport control etc.) are likely to be less receptive to waste management prompts than they would be in their daily lives; to drive more mindful recycling, simple, innovative and attention-grabbing engagement methods are needed. To uncover the best ways of doing this, we proposed a combination of audits, surveys and observation – digging into passenger and staff behaviours (and attitudes) and looking at where existing signage, messaging and bin provision falls flat.

This data will highlight what specific approaches and strategies are needed, and where they will be most effective in changing recycling behaviours across the entire estate.

The study supports a number of changes that could save 10,000s of tonnes of material from being wasted.

Specifically targeting food waste, we suggested a targeted follow-up study: this will identify the major sources of food waste and assess where interventions would make the most difference. Including back-of-house areas and retail outlets within the airport is a crucial part of this study: this will shine a light on how food is being handled – and wasted – behind the scenes.

Identifying priorities for action

Our data shows that the major recycling contaminants (which cause more than half of collected recycling to be discarded) are food waste and non-recyclable paper or card, non-recyclable plastics, and liquids. The latter makes up a large proportion of all material streams: much of this comes from plastic bottles being thrown away with liquid still inside, which leads to vast quantities of plastic (that could otherwise be recycled) being wasted.

Removing the liquid (and its associated weight) before it reaches the recycling stream could reduce transport and disposal costs by as much as 17%. This could be done in a couple of ways: by getting passengers to empty containers before recycling, or by using compactors to ‘puncture’ the bottles, releasing the liquid and producing a clean plastic stream.

Informing a long-term circularity strategy

Our data analysis identified several areas where improvements could be made, suggested specific trials and methods for capturing and diverting key recyclable items, and outlined expanded parameters for future studies that would help to build a more complete picture of waste sources within terminals.

These findings – along with separately-commissioned research into construction waste generation and International Air Transport Association (IATA) cabin waste composition data – have been used to inform Heathrow’s updated Resources and Waste Strategy.

This strategy sets out a number of planned activities to reduce airport operational waste, including the introduction of a ‘pay as you throw’ scheme, encourage reusable packaging, exploring opportunities to improve back-of-house facilities and waste infrastructure, and setting new performance standards and procurement processes for buying and leasing that prioritise waste reduction.

Additionally, the airport operator has committed to establishing a resource exchange platform, creating reuse partnerships with local charities, and phasing out single-use bottles and cups.

These efforts are expected to enable the diversion of thousands of tonnes of recyclable material away from energy from waste and landfill, helping the airport to bring down its operational waste for good.