Jetrader - November/December 2011 - 23

Boeing’s Bill Carberry on airplane recycling initiatives, AFRA’s creation:

Plastic’s Not Always Fantastic
Composite materials used on today’s airliners, as well as the increased structural use of carbon ﬁber, as is used for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, provide both problems and promise for aircraft recyclers. Interiors—Today’s aircraft ﬂoor panels, carpets, sidewalls and seats rely on composite materials, many containing additives like Kevlar, brominated ﬂ ame retardants and chromium that can pose environmental challenges. “It’s an extremely complex and not a very recycling-friendly material,” said Boeing Commercial Airplanes recycling program manager Bill Carberry. “It’s great at performing its mission, but it’s patently not recyclable.” However, Carberry said Boeing has several technologies in work currently that might turn that situation around, including the efforts of nine companies within the nonproﬁt Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association (AFRA) working on interiors recycling improvements. Structural—About 50,000 pounds of carbon ﬁber are used to build each new Boeing 787, and while its endof-service life issues are decades away, almost all of the composite material should be recoverable at that point. Meanwhile the industry is making tremendous inroads into recycling carbon ﬁber production scrap. Boeing tests have shown that the material’s strength and quality can meet performance requirements in other high-end manufacturing applications that use carbon ﬁber composites. “We are even not that far away from getting recycled carbon ﬁber back on the airplane,” said Boeing’s Carberry. For more information on AFRA’s members and mission, visit its website at www.AFRAassociation.org.

“We agreed we ought to help industry perform better from within, before the regulators helped us. That’s been Boeing’s position all along. We’re not in the end-of-life business; we build the best aircraft and want to do what we can to improve value through and at the end of the service life.”
The company held its ﬁrst product environmental symposium around 2003. It unearthed questions from participants about what the company, and industry overall, were doing to improve end-of-service-life impacts and capture more value from the process. It kicked off a few years’ effort to determine a common direction and assemble like-minded organizations interested in tackling improvements to the ways that parts and materials were recovered and hazardous byproducts dealt with. Carberry, who began his career in hazardous waste management and corporate safety and health, said it was a core group of 11 companies that led to the formation of what today is the 52-member, global nonproﬁt AFRA, which pursued a charter focused on having industry solve its own problems related to recycling and its environmental impacts. “We agreed we ought to help industry perform better from within, before the regulators helped us. That’s been Boeing’s position all along. We’re not in the end-of-life business; we build the best aircraft and want to do what we can to improve value through and at the end of the service life,” Carberry explained. What began as primarily an association to develop industry guidance has morphed into today’s AFRA, which Carberry, now an AFRA board member and its deputy director, says is as much an R&D consortium as it is an industry standards-setting association. AFRA’s current R&D projects include developing a hazardous materials database, improving materials separation, improved aircraft aluminum recovery, interiors recycling, and wire de-insulation techniques among others. “Companies bring technologies from their industry niche, and they develop them and own the intellectual property rights. It’s a great collaboration,” said Carberry.

AFRA: Industry Leaders Making Recycling History
The Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association, based in Washington, D.C., has members operating in a dozen countries around the world. As of September 2011, the following 16 are AFRA Accredited Companies which have committed to the organization’s Best Management Practice, the highest standard in the aircraft recycling industry: • Air Salvage International (UK) • AerSale (US) • Bombardier (US) • Evergreen Trading (US) • JMV Aviation (Luxemburg) • Orange Aero (UK) • Stewart Industries (US) • Valliere Group (France) • AELS (Aircraft End of Life Solutions (Netherlands) • Avocet Capital LLC (US) • Bonus Tech (US) • GECAS (US) • Magellan Group (US + Ireland) • P3 Aviation (UK) • Southern California Aviation (US) • VAS (US)

Ambitious Goal Faces Challenge
AFRA adopted a goal originally promulgated by Boeing for industry to achieve a target of 90 percent recycling of the materials obtained from aircraft recovery, preferably for reuse in the airplane manufacturing supply chain, by 2016. “Poor-performing companies were getting the aluminum and throwing the rest away. Medium performers were recovering

(Bold face indicates 2011 accreditations)

Jetrader 23
http://www.AFRAassociation.org http://www.naylornetwork.com/ist-nxt/
Jetrader - November/December 2011

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