The Turkish flag carrier, flying to over 300 destinations on five continents, continues to make strides towards a better future for our world.
In 2021, the global brand prevented tens of thousands of trees from being cut and hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of water from contamination, with its sustainable measures focused on: humanity, the world, improvement, and management.
Turkish Airlines works tirelessly to solve environmental problems facing our world in every sphere of its operations – from air cargo to catering onboard, from aircraft MRO to ground services at airports. One of the latest initiatives is using environmentally friendly fuel, starting with its Istanbul–Paris flight on February 2, 2022.
The carrier plans to increase the frequencies and destinations that use this fuel, which is now being used on one flight per week on the Paris, Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, London, and Stockholm flights.
Turkish Airlines Chairman of the Board and the Executive Committee, Prof. Dr. Ahmet Bolat, commented on these environmental measures and stated: “As Turkish Airlines, we fly to more countries than any other carrier, with 128 countries in our flight network, and every destination we fly to has its unique worthiness waiting to be discovered. Therefore, protecting the future of these regions possessing unique beauty, with their natural, historical, financial, or cultural assets is significant for the Turkish Airlines family.
“While carrying many passengers to these wonderous destinations every day, we also wish to carry these rare works of our world to the future intact. With this perspective in mind, we optimize all of our operations with sustainable endeavors and protect our world for future generations. Turkish Airlines will continue to fly in blue skies, above a green ground.”
The maintenance hangar recycles rainwater into useable water
As the region’s foremost MRO company, Turkish Technic promises a more environmentally conscious future with its renewed facilities. Turkish Technic’s C/D hangar, one of the service locations for the company and Turkey’s biggest aircraft maintenance facility, stores rainwater and turns it into usable water. These recycled waters are then used daily instead of drawing water from the city’s water supplies. In 2021, the use of rainwater met 54% of the facility’s water usage.
With over 1 billion USD revenue from its 2021 operations, Turkish Technic makes a significant contribution to Turkey’s exports while ensuring that the company prevents the waste of 1.471 million liters of water, an enormous amount that equals the usage by 59 thousand people.
Electric vehicles of TGS travel around 24 thousand miles a day
Turkish Ground Services (TGS) operates 309 electric vehicles in nine airports in Istanbul and Anatolia, and that number is rising every day. Ranging from pushback vehicles that move aircraft to baggage tractors, electric cars contribute to environmentally conscious operations of TGS. When the daily active hours of vehicles are counted, they collectively travel approximately 24 thousand miles a day, almost the circumference of the Earth.
The company’s environmentalist actions are not limited to this either. Working with a zero-waste goal in all of its work processes, ground services operators prevented 2152 tons of hazardous and 294 tons of non-hazardous waste from being dumped in nature in 2021 alone, and just at the Istanbul airports.
Company aircraft saved fuel enough to plant thousands of trees
The most significant returns for the environmental operations of Turkish Airlines come from fuel-saving efforts. By productively adapting processes such as single-engine taxi methods, route optimizations, and flight center of gravity during planning, the flag carrier saved 37,820 tons of fuel and prevented 116,809 tons of carbon emissions from being released into the atmosphere in 2021 alone. This equals the planting of 292 thousand trees or saving 473 flights between Istanbul and New York in a wide-body aircraft.
Operating with one of the world’s youngest fleets, Turkish Airlines aims to increase its fuel-saving by enhancing its fleet with new generation aircraft.
