The United States’ largest domestic carrier, Southwest Airlines, announced in October it will be swapping out single-use plastics with eco-friendly cups and stir sticks for its inflight cold beverages. Introducing these bamboo cups and wooden sticks is expected to reduce the airline’s single-use plastics by more than 1.5 million pounds annually — roughly the weight of 3.7 Boeing 747-400s.
The sustainable commitment helps the company move toward its goal of completely eliminating single-use plastics by 2030 and also fits into its even broader “Nonstop to Net Zero” strategy. The new cold cups are made of 93% non-plastic materials — primarily a pulp blend of 75% bamboo and 25% paper and a lining made from polyethylene — and will display Southwest Airlines’ Heart branding.
Photo Courtesy Southwest Airlines
Helen Giles, the managing director of environmental sustainability at Southwest Airlines, spoke about their eco-friendly inflight initiatives. “We expect our new bamboo cold cup, wood stir stick, and other initiatives to exceed our goal to reduce plastics from inflight 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,” she said in a press release.
Unfortunately for pandas, bamboo is increasingly becoming a go-to sustainable alternative to less environmentally friendly materials like plastic. The reasons are plentiful. It’s quick to mature, extremely durable, climate-resilient, cheap, renewable, biodegradable, and easy to grow worldwide. Bamboo is also versatile, so it can be used in construction, clothing, furniture, and — yes, even — inflight cups.
The wooden stir sticks won’t be sourced from bamboo but birch wood. However, not just any birch wood: 100% FSC-certified birch wood.
Southwest specifically chose to replace the plastic cups and stir sticks after conducting a sustainability analysis of its inflight operations and determining those two were the biggest sources of its single-use plastics.
Photo Courtesy Southwest Airlines
These changes are the most significant of its recent eco-friendly inflight service initiatives, but they aren’t the first. The airline spent much of 2024 extensively researching, designing, and testing the replacements. The first big iteration came in July when Southwest entirely removed plastic from its inflight napkins by switching to paper overwrap sourced from 100% post-consumer recycled materials.
In addition to the new napkins, cups, and stir sticks, the company has announced one sustainable inflight service plan but hasn’t yet enacted it. Southwest is developing a select-a-snack offering available on its Hawaii flights, targeting the reduction of food waste and single-use plastic packaging. Once operational, the airline estimates that the new program will cut down 18,000 pounds of its inflight plastic each year.
While literal tons of plastic sit between Southwest Airlines and its goal to eliminate inflight single-use plastics by 2030, that mound of plastic was once a mountain.
