Southwest Airlines continues to make headlines for its “bold moves.” Most recently, the airline company announced a new board chair and committee heads. In addition to the new leads, the airline continues its push towards a more environmentally friendly strategy. The latest effort sees the Airline saying goodbye to plastic cups.
The mission is certainly a positive one, and is set to have a positive environmental impact in the upcoming years. However, feedback about the replacement of the cups is seemingly more negative than they’d hoped.
Let’s take a closer look at the bamboo cups, and why one passenger complained about Southwest’s newest on-flight addition.
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Southwest Airlines Is Committing To Bamboo Cold Cups, And Wood Stir Sticks
Southwest Airlines introduced its newest environmentally-friendly cup made out of 75% bamboo and 25% paper blend. This is a major advancement, with 93% of the cups using non-plastic materials. This will help heavily against plastic waste – bringing it down by more than 1.5 million pounds per year.
Southwest’s Managing Director of Environmental Sustainability, Helen Giles, expects plastics to be reduced by 50% in weight by 2025.
“We expect our new bamboo cold cup, wood stir stick, and other initiatives to exceed our goal to reduce plastics from in-flight service by 50% by weight by 2025, and 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.”
Southwest Airlines added on their Instagram page:
“Both the new cup and stir stick will help Southwest work toward our goal to reduce our annual single-use plastics from inflight service by more than 1.5 million pounds!”
While the reaction at the moment is generally positive, there are still some skeptics out there.
One Instagram user wrote, “Love the sustainability effort but my sparkling wine tasted awful out of these cups on my flight to LGB last Thursday. I literally thought I was drinking champagne out of a coffee cup.”
Other passengers didn’t mind the change, “I just flew SWA from ABQ TO Long Beach and noticed the new drink cups and the Stellar Snacks Pretzels. Absolutely love them.”
It will be an adjustment for passengers, but one that sends the right message.
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Southwest Airlines Has Other Sustainability Goals On The Road To Zero Carbon Emissions By 2050
Southwest Airlines aircraft
Southwest Airlines is making other strides in its sustainability strategy. The ultimate goal of the airline is for a more “sustainable future.” One of the plans is to electrify half of the ground support equipment by 2030.
“Electrifying 50% of eligible ground support equipment (GSE) system-wide by 20302. The carrier has electrified 33% of eligible GSE and plans to work with airports to evaluate electric infrastructure to support additional expansion,” the investor relations website writes.
Other Southwest Goals:
- Saving 50 million incremental gallons of jet fuel by 2025
- Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050
- Replacing 10% of total jet fuel consumption by 2030
- Reducing energy at the Company’s Dallas corporate headquarters by 50% by 2035
Southwest continues to make advancements in the right direction.