13 ms·
"In 2017, when United Airlines reduced the weight of its paper in its inflight magazine, it saved nearly 770,000 litres of fuel a year – or $290,000 in costs."
by _Microft 6y ago
"In 2017, when United Airlines reduced the weight of its paper in its inflight magazine, it saved nearly 770,000 litres of fuel a year – or $290,000 in costs."
This hit home.
770000 litres of jet kerosene translate to 2100 tons of CO_2 emissions[0]. That's the emissions of more than 200 average Germans or 50% of the emissions of over 400 people.
Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all, so maybe even more people would be required for an equivalent reduction in emissions.
Now: if someone at an airline thinks that the inflight magazine feels cheap now and that it should be printed on better paper again, it would wipe out any emission savings that hundreds of people could ever hope to achieve personally. Makes one feels a bit helpless, doesn't it?
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosin https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosin (Look for "Kohlendioxidemissionen bei Verbrennung").
Edit: the point I wanted to make is that a willy-nilly decision of someone with sufficient influence can have way more effect that intentional decisions of average people could ever have.
- draugadrotten 6y agoSorry to be blunt, but imagine the CO2 savings if every passenger went to the bathroom before the flight.
- awiesenhofer 6y agosounds like something ryanair would love to implement in an instant
- bbarnett 6y agoPlus, it would make full body cavity searches easier to mandate! A win for all! (coming soon to your local district)
- benhurmarcel 6y agoActually Ryanair did suggest to make the toilet paying in flight at some point.
- taneq 6y agoGoes double if they could eliminate (heh) the toilets and all associated weight as well.
- Loughla 6y agoHonestly - the flight I took the most pre-covid was a regional commuter between a midwest city and Washington DC. It's like a 2.5 hour flight, at most. Why do you need a toilet for that? I understand there are disabilities that may call for it. But in the 10-15 years I made that flight regularly, I never saw someone use the toilet an extreme amount. It was more for convenience. I have to assume that those short-haul flights could save a ton of fuel by eliminating toilets. But I also have a young(ish) bladder and young(ish) digestive system. So maybe I'm just too self-centered.
- mumblemumble 6y agoIt's also that you have a old(ish) bladder and an old(ish) digestive system. Accommodations for other people's physical needs is a pretty serious Chesterton's Fence situation.
- electricviolet 6y agoCan you imagine the misery and chaos if someone on the flight desperately needs the restroom and there isn't one?
- mmcconnell1618 6y agoNow imagine an entire cruise ship where the toilets don't work: https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/17/travel/carnival-cruise-triumph-problems/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/17/travel/carnival-cruise-triump...
- themaninthedark 6y agoWoman with a heavy menstrual cycle. Possibility of plane unable to take off at the scheduled time but holding on the runway to make the next available slot. The problem with cutting some things out is that, even though it might not be utilized 95% of the time, that 5% when you need it, you really need it. Similar to the backup generator for your data center and justifying it along with the maintenance and tests that go along with it to your boss. My worry with the direction that engineering is moving, lean, is that we are reducing our safeties below a good level. I see the philosophy moving to other areas, such as finance, creating a race to the bottoms where everyone is leveraged as much as possible. Then when a crisis hits, everyone is unable to survive and we have to turn to government bailouts. Lean philosophy has recently been targeting healthcare, as a way to reduce cost and reduce adverse outcome while improving quality. While I do think this is important, looking at what is going on in the middle of a pandemic. Is a contributing factor of hospitals running out of masks and ventilators due to lean inventory management practices? I read a lot a about food wast and how we over produce, it seems logical that there will be a push for lean practices there as well. I could see it being made as a strategy to reduce the amount of CO2 as well as farm land. But conversely, with climate change and the risk of crop failure, is that a good idea?
- sandworm101 6y agoSome Japanese airlines have done exactly that. https://japantoday.com/category/features/ana-asks-passengers-to-go-to-toilet-before-boarding https://japantoday.com/category/features/ana-asks-passengers... "All Nippon Airways is taking its weight-saving efforts to new heights, asking passengers on some of its flights to visit the restroom before flying."
- jacquesm 6y agoThat's getting suspiciously close to a passage from the Hitchhikers guide where you are instructed to get a receipt every time you use the lavatory otherwise you might end up with some quick surgery before departure.
- Quarrelsome 6y agoIf we actually care about climate change then shouldn't we be thinking like this though?
- majewsky 6y agoIf one cares about climate change, it would be an odd strategy to focus on 0.1% fuel efficiency increases while 10% of flights can somewhat easily be replaced by video calls.
- simonh 6y agoBecause clearly it's not possible to do both?
- majewsky 6y agoPlease point to where I suggested that it's not possible to want or have both. The operative word in my comment is "to focus on".
- simonh 6y agoI don’t think that is helpful though. Some people focus on this, others focus on that, and we can all both cut down our journeys while also packing lighter when we do travel. We’re not going to solve this by ‘focusing on’ any one thing. I’m really tired of criticisms of perfectly good work that amount to ‘but this other thing is more important’. There’s almost always something else more important. So what?
- Shivetya 6y agoright about the same time we get the paperless office will we see a transition to video conferencing taking over in face. change is hard hell at work that is one thing they want to get back in office for is face to face. they have mandated cameras for all managers working remote and looking to do the same for other workers. Still there are teams that are doing one day face to face meetings.
- 6y ago
- brummm 6y agoOr charge a carbon fee for fat people?
- iso8859-1 6y agoSurcharge for all heads that are not in vats!
- durnygbur 6y agoPapper magazine?! Why on earth they carry onboard a little warehouse of cosmetics, perfumes, plastic merchandise, and other overpriced tat no one buys? Yet it's the passenger luggage which they've (ie. airlines in general) always targeted with their ridiculous corporate cost-cutting policies.
- czzr 6y agoObviously people do buy them otherwise they would stop. Passenger luggage is targeted partly because it is pure cost, but also it’s a price discrimination mechanism.
- newyankee 6y agoThis raises a question, shouldn't a ticket price component has some relationship with your weight. Discounts/extra prices depending on your how much away you are from design assumptions.
- bartread 6y agoMany airlines already require obese passengers to pay for two seats.
- randycupertino 6y agoThis would be great but how on earth would we get people to comply? We can't even get people to wear masks in stores right now without throwing a tantrum. People would like lie like crazy regarding their weight. Heck, my driver license is 25lbs lower than I currently am. I guess you could alleviate the embarrassment factor by making it a total passenger + baggage max so people could weigh themselves AND their carryons at home before they arrive to confirm and offset anything. Interesting idea though!
- avh02 6y agothe same way they enforce baggage requirements. When money's involved, the enforcement will happen. Maybe you buy "x kg plus or minus 5 kg" and they weigh you and penalize/refund if it's changed since buying the ticket.
- majewsky 6y ago> refund Ha, good one.
- TwoHeadedBeast 6y agoNot sure why you're getting the downvotes. If I pay for a 25kg bag instead of 20kg, and I don't use the extra, I definitely do not get a refund.
- Symbiote 6y ago
- cies 6y agoIf taxes on petrol are not charged for airlines, those businesses will for sure use their cheap petrol in their advantage. The nice-thick-paper mags must have helped them make quite a bit of money on "in flight purchases". If we are serious about cutting CO2(-equivalent) emissions, we must tax all emittors equally. Airlines should not be able to escape it, or we will keep seeing this kind of oddities in that high pollution industry.
- nickff 6y agoI don't mean to nit-pick, but 'petrol' and 'gasoline' are not generic terms for fuel. Some (piston-engined) propeller airplanes use petrol/gasoline, and are usually exempted from certain local taxes (as are marine users and farm users). Airliners are usually powered by turbine engines (often 'jets'), fueled by kerosene (or one of the JP-series fuels) which fall under their own tax regimes. *addendum: apparently Canada has implemented or is planning to implement a carbon tax on aviation fuel.
- cies 6y agoThanks. If I say "petroleum" would that cover all types of dinosaur juice? (I only want to cover the liquids, not coal or wood)
- jnxx 6y ago> Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all It is very easy if you travel by plane several times per year, even on short distances, and you just stop to do that. In fact, it is probably the most effective thing you can do to reduce your own lifetime carbon footprint. A single two-hour flight produces around 400 kilograms of CO2 per person. This is equivalent to several months of heating in a cold country. And don't start me harping about "offsetting" carbon emissions. Carbon has been captured in the course of hundreds of millions of years. There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. Almost all carbon from a tree is released when the tree dies. In fact, it is even worse for coal. The coal deposits which we still exploit today, against all better knowledge, have mostly been formed during the carboniferous geological period. In this period, there were NO bacteria and fungi which could decompose lignin, the main structural component of wood. In other words, the wood from trees could not decay, which was the base for the coal deposits from the carboniferous period, which still form most of the coal today. The consequence of this is that burning coal is irreversible even in the course of tens of thousands of years, because the conditions under which this coal has been formed - an absence of fungi that can decompose lignin - simply do not exist any more. We are not only doing massive damage to the next generations of human children, but we are profoundly and irreversibly changing the conditions for life on Earth.
- samatman 6y ago> There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. This is simply untrue. Grow woody biomass, and combust it in a reducing environment, and you get carbon. It's biologically inert. Bury it. It's not difficult, or impractical, and even if you mix it into soil, it will remain sequestered for centuries or millennia. It's just... charcoal. Why would we have to make coal in the way it was made in the carboniferous? Your doom posting doesn't make any sense.
- fogihujy 6y agoExactly, it might not happen naturally at the same scale anymore, but getting carbon back into the ground is definitely possible. The main issue is cost/effort.
- iso1631 6y ago> 770,000 litres of fuel a year Out of 15,000,000,000 litres that they did use. Their fuel costs were $5.649 billion. They reduced the cost to $5.649 billion. They reduced their fuel usage from 15 billion litres to 15 billion litres. They justified some high-paid execs salary.
- a5withtrrs 6y agoI've always wished they'd remove the unnecessary advertising for luxury goods I'll never buy since I'm flying in cattle class, this further drives home that sentiment. I suspect the only reason they keep them is due to the advertising revenue they gain by printing them in the first place. Digital entertainment systems built into the screens or served over WiFi are slowly replacing them, but I doubt there's a weight reduction with the screen based solutions.
- jimbokun 6y ago> Makes one feels a bit helpless, doesn't it? Not so much. It makes me feel like just putting the right economic incentives in place, will rapidly lead to savings no one imagined possible before. As you point out, motivating individuals to reduce their carbon footprint is incredibly inefficient, as it is very difficult for individuals to make much difference if the goods and services they consume are not also optimized to become more carbon efficient. But if 770000 liters of kerosene can be saved by making the inflight magazine lighter, can you imagine what other low hanging fruit are out there, if incentivized by the right kind of carbon taxes and other incentives? Businesses can very rapidly adapt and make changes with outsize impact like this, far more than individuals can.
- hintymad 6y agoWell, then imagine how much CO2 emission it saves if all of us cancel our traveling plans, especially those nice twice-a-year overseas family vacations. Oh wait, that's one of the privileges that anyone dares to take away, right?
- mauriciolange 6y agoAnd it is a rather good point. Corporations should bear the burden of changing "consumption" habits, much more than individuals, as any corporate action scales much more than individual actions.