San Francisco’s international airport (SFO) is in the midst of a five-year strategic plan to become a zero “waste-to-landfill” facility by 2021. For their next order of business, the airport is banning convenience shops, restaurants and vending machines from selling plastic water bottles in the airport.
Starting on 20 August, only water in glass, recycled aluminum, or certified compostable materials can be sold. In addition, the airport has also installed nearly 100 water-bottle filling stations and mandated that restaurants only give customers single-use accessories such as condiment packets upon request instead of with each purchase.
Beyond this, the airport is limiting single-use food accessories such as napkins, coffee cups, and chopsticks—and making it so that bottles with labels that say things such as “environmentally friendly” have to be approved by the Biodegradable Plastics Institute (BPI) before they are sold.
According to SFO, each airport guest creates a half-pound of trash. With these new measures, along with more that have yet to be implemented, the airport hopes to shrink that number down to zero.
