A leading light in the aircraft seat sustainability movement, Acro Aircraft Seating reveals that every seat part it uses now carries a unique recycling code from the Aircraft Interior Recycling Association (AIRA).
In 2023, AIRA, which helps industry stakeholders reduce their carbon footprint and successfully contribute to the Circular Economy, launched what it calls ‘the first qualifying, certification and recycling system for cabin interiors materials.’ Every part is assigned a recycling code, allowing AIRA to send it to the relevant recycling firm within its network after dismantling.
“Those codes now live in our Component Recycling Manual, giving operators a validated route to recycle seats properly, rather than defaulting to landfill or mixed scrap,” Acro Aircraft Seating says.
“Through this collaboration,” it adds, AIRA has “proven a full closed-loop pathway for metals and polymers: dismantled, segregated, recovered, reprocessed, and qualified for reuse. Final certification is in progress.”
The UK-headquartered seatmaker has long worked to achieve 100% recyclability of its seats. An initial independent recyclability audit conducted by AIRA confirmed that 99% (or more precisely, 98.83%) of the firm’s popular Series 9 economy class seat is recyclable.
Since then, Acro’s Series 3 and Series 6 economy seats have also gone through full independent audits which entails disassembly, material identification, emissions modeling and recyclability assessment.
The results are already changing how Acro designs aircraft seats, the company says in a statement published on LinkedIn. Every Acro part now carries the unique AIRA code, “solving the ‘unknown polymer’ problem that’s historically blocked recycling in aviation.”
But Acro and AIRA’s work could have much wider implications for the industry.
“[R]ight now, most recovered aircraft materials leak out of aviation into general scrap markets, where their value is lost. Without a unified, scientific-based system, material streams stay too small and inconsistent to support real circularity. As this becomes standard, the story shifts from a seat after-market to a materials after-market,” Acro says.
“This is what genuine sustainability work looks like: slow, technical and unglamorous, but building toward something the industry actually needs.”
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Featued image credited to Acro
