The sale of recyclable materials recovered from an airport's waste stream is generally not sufficient to cover the costs of sorting through the waste to extract those materials. Even so, savings can be realized through cost avoidance - by reducing the amount of waste needing to the landfilled or incinerated. These savings, in turn, can help pay for the sorting expense. Our research has found that for most large airports a carefully run recycling and waste management program can be operated at the same overall cost as they currently pay to throw away their wastes without any recycling.

Fort Lauderdale - Hollywood International Airport offers a good example. When we started the FLL recycling program in 1989, non-recyclable wastes were sent to the landfill at a cost of around $30 per ton. As landfill space became scarce, Broward County ordered the construction of an incinerator and mandated that all wastes be sent there, at a disposal cost of nearly $100 per ton. Since 1989, passenger counts at FLL have also tripled causing waste production to triple as well. Without the ARS program, airlines would have seen their waste disposal costs increase roughly tenfold (3 times more waste subject to 3 times the per ton disposal cost).

By aggressively recycling, however, ARS was able to reduce the amount of material going to the incinerator by over 50%. Through careful management of the remaining non-recyclable wastes, we also substantially reduced the number of hauls to the incinerator. This allowed us to keep airline costs relatively flat despite the major increases in passengers and disposal fees. In fact, accounting for inflation, some airlines are actually paying less for waste disposal today than they were in 1989 before ARS started operations.

Similar savings are available to other airports and airlines through the proprietary recycling and waste management strategies ARS has developed over the past two decades.