SEA-TAC AIRPORT - In a warehouse in the airport's cargo area, they snap on blue gloves and start digging. Staff members from Horizon Air's food and beverage operations are doing an assessment on the company's trash. Are they hitting their goal of recycling everything possible?
Horizon says it started recycling back int he late 1980s because it was the right thing to do. Now that recycling is main stream, the less garbage they throw away at airports, including Sea-Tac, costs go down. It costs $100 a ton to throw away trash through the port, virtually nothing to recycle it.
So what do you leave behind after a flight? Well, that depends on the flight. We accompanied Jenna Shea-Bowdin and Environmental Affiars Manager jackie Drumheller on an audit this week. They do it once a quarter, picking out a few flights, loading bags of trash into a van and heading to the warehouse.
Two flights were examined, one short morning one from Portland to Seattle that's typically patronized by business people. That flight is heavy on newspapers, which are recyclable, and small coffee cups that are not. Flight No. 2 came in the night before from Reno.
"This is coming in from what we call party city," said Sea-Bowdin.
The hop from Portland is about a half hour in the air; the Reno flight lasts two hours.
The Reno flight is long on glass, mostly beer and wine bottles. But bottles are recyclable, and since the assessment is based on weight, 98 percent of trash on that flight was recylable. It was 71 percent on the hop from Portland. Overall, Horizon claims to recycle nearly 70 percent of all its on board waste.
"A lot of them have been recycling aluminum cans for quite some time," said Drumheller. "But Horizon is the only one that's been successfully recycling the other things; the plastics and the paper for 20 years now."
That now includes compostables like coffee grounds, but finding recyclable coffee cups in the size they need has been difficult and is still a work in progress.
Tuesday night in Vancouver, Wash., Horizon is to be officially named Recycler of the Year by the Washington State Recycling Association.
To add a comment, please register or login.