For Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which sees more than 100 million passengers each year, most of them doing a bit of dining, drinking or shopping, the stakes are high for the environment — and for the airport’s own sustainability goals.
ATL has already replaced its toilets with water efficient versions, added 100 charging stations at the new red parking deck, experimented with compostable service ware and added water refill stations to reduce the use of plastic bottles, among many other low-hanging efforts to address the environmental byproducts of what is already seen as a polluting activity: air travel.
But waste diversion had remained a stubborn problem as the City of Atlanta, which has authority over the airport, remains far short of its goal of keeping 90 percent of trash collected out of landfills. How to sort different streams, and at which point to do so in the collection process, has long been on the minds of airport officials.