Rubbish fuels British Airways plane

Following several successful biofuel-powered flights around the world, British Airways (BA) has disclosed its plan to utilize low carbon fuel on some of its aircrafts starting 2014.

The UK national airline, together with Solena, is projecting to build at the UK capital the first sustainable fuel facility in Europe. As part of the company’s continuing strategy for 2050 to curb carbon gas emissions by half, the facility will produce jet fuel from waste materials for use on BA aircrafts.

There are four sites under consideration for the plant that is to be put up and run by the US-based Solena. The facility will employ about 1,200 people.

The airline company claims that the facility will produce 16 million gallons of biofuel each year from 500,000 tonnes of waste – more than adequate to make all London-based BA flights carbon neutral. The cut in carbon gas emission is assessed to be similar to taking 48,000 cars off the road every year. In addition, the biofuel facility will annually produce 20MW of electricity.

However, several pro-environment groups have expressed concerns over BA’s capability to turn up with a sustainable plan to the fast-growing aviation industry. Green campaigners are cynical about the project, stating that biofuel initiatives oftentimes produce even higher greenhouse emission and they have negative impacts to food crops.

Biofuel has increasingly grown as an environmentally-friendly substitute to kerosene-based jet fuel. In the previous years, Continental, Air New Zealand, JAL, Virgin Atlantic and KLM had used several types of aviation biofuel for their flights.