Matt Crane, the founder of the Aviation Sustainability Forum, will be moderating a session during Taste of Travel entitled Innovating Supply Chains – How to Overcome Barriers to Embrace Circularity. The session will take place from 3.00 pm to 4.00 pm on Tuesday, June 6 at the Taste of Travel Theatre within the Hamburg Messe.
The session will address issues relating to cabin waste reduction and what is holding up the progress that parties are hoping to achieve.
Aviation Sustainability Forum
Matt Crane provides background and outlines the issues facing the industry at present:
In 2022 a Taste of Travel panel at the World Travel Catering Expo (WTCE) made up of business leaders from the International Air Transport Association ( IATA), the Aviation Sustainability Forum (ASF), the International Inflight Services Association (IFSA), the Airline Catering Association (ACA) and the International Aviation Waste Management Association (IAWMA) discussed the need for cross-sector collaboration and alignment if aviation’s supply chain for inflight passenger products and services is to be redesigned and, in doing so, present a compelling case for regulation change that will allow us to embrace the circular economy for the International Cabin Waste (ICW) that we create.
A year on and where are we?
Multiple initiatives have been launched by airlines, caterers plus governing and trade bodies. Each has aims of waste reduction, single-use plastic (SUP) removal and regulation change.
Have we made progress? Yes.
Have we fully recognised that we are better when all ICW supply chain stakeholders work together and take collective responsibility to develop the new solutions that our entire sector can embrace? Not yet.
2023 Taste of Travel session
James George, a senior strategist in the circular economy and systems change for business will join me at the Taste of Travel Theatre on June 6.
James has worked for many years with the Ellen Macarthur Foundation and has valuable experience across retail, agriculture, technology, logistics and transport sectors that aviation may be able to learn from. He is a leading speaker on supply chain change and how to embrace the environmental and financial benefits of the circular economy.
He speaks about the difficulty of supply chain change where no single body has all the answers. He will address why a different lens is needed to ensure that we break out of the current system.
Our ICW supply chains are fragmented. If we try to develop solutions that deal with just one part of the problem and ignore its systemic nature, we will end up creating multiple partial solutions.
James argues that most sectors do all of this against a language of sustainability that remains inaccessible to most people in our organisations.
Environmental ambitions
Instead, we need to talk about our environmental ambitions in terms that our people understand – from the board room to the shop floor. We will only see that change that we need when we link our ambitions to the key performance indicators (KPIs) and objective-key performance indicators (OKRs) that we already have in place and align these with those of our supply chain counterparts.
Until then, progress will be slow and unaligned. Perhaps it is that which is holding us back from making the progress in ICW that we are all looking to achieve.
Book an appointment at the WTCE to meet a member of the Aviation Sustainability Forum.
Log into the WTCE Connect Tool to plan meetings and attendance at Taste of Travel sessions.
You can read more about how airlines are tackling food and beverage waste on the WTCE website.
Innovating supply chains
James George will join Matt Crane at the Taste of Travel Theatre to discuss how aviation can learn from other sectors to develop the solutions needed to embrace the circular economy opportunity for ICW.
