JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #112 - April/May 2017 - 50

AERONAUTlCS
environment

Recycling airplanes: a fast-developing market
The aviation industry will be more environment friendly, thanks to technological advances and new ideas for safe recycling of secondhand parts from
end-of-life airplanes.

irplanes are often abandoned in
aircraft cemeteries or airports, or
sold for scrap after 20 or 30 years
of good and faithful service, generating an
accumulation of waste that is potentially
harmful for the environment. Even if
some of the components do get recycled,
the cost-effectiveness of the process has
not been demonstrated. Nevertheless, an
aircraft's constituent materials still garner
interest, and a European research project
in Châteauroux (central France) focuses
on reintegrating them into the production
chain.
Some 800 airplanes worldwide are taken
out of service each year (this figure includes
only commercial passenger aircraft with
more than 100 seats), including obsolete
airplanes from the 1970s and 80s. At the rate
of 700 or 800 per year, recycling airplanes is
becoming a niche market industry.
Twenty years ago and until the early 2000s,
an airplane could remain in service for 30
years if it received regular technical inspections. Nowadays, airplanes will be disassembled much sooner, after only 20 years
of flying, because the ten-year maintenance
cycle has become extremely expensive.
Rethinking the aircraft life cycle
As environmental issues become more
and more a matter of consideration, the
entire aircraft life cycle will be reviewed
and revised, from design to utilization and
airport operations, in order to reduce the
environmental impact.

Environmental engineer Ayce Celikel has
spent the last 20 years thinking about how
to reduce the impacts of aviation pollution.
Financed by her company, Envisa, her research focuses on understanding the origins
of the pollution and modelling the global
aircraft/airport context, using the new transition standards. Ayce has done work for
the European Commission, the European
Environment Agency, the European
Aviation Safety Agency, and Eurocontrol.
For a long time, manufacturers focused
on operations. But now that air traffic has
increased, it is becoming urgent to set up a
circular economy. Engineers are thinking
more and more about what comes next,
in particular about recycling so that EOL
aircraft won't be a total material and environmental loss.
The E-Bay of aviation
In 2014, Richard Hervé and Ayce Celikel
had the brilliant idea to create AeroBay, an
online auction platform for surplus aircraft
parts from airline companies, operators and
aviation manufacturers, but also aircraft
parts from dismantled aircraft. So far,
the site lists 20,000 components for sale,
accompanied by all necessary regulatory
information. On an aircraft, it is possible to
replace a part determined to be defective
with a second-hand part and still comply
strictly with regulatory requirements, as
long as there is a certificate of airworthiness
for the secondhand part.
The secondhand market concerns all
airplane and helicopter equipment, from
engines to system equipment, cabin components, and even structural components.
AeroBay has no limits and lists all types

jec composites magazine / No112 April - May 2017

of aircraft parts that can be installed on an
airplane.
With the aim of total recycling, the aircraft
parts that are not used in aviation can be of
interest to other sectors, for alternative uses
such as decoration, cockpits for training
schools, etc. Aerobay will also enable the
recycling industry to sell the elements
removed from airplanes to other industries.
What about the composite materials
present in newer aircraft?
Completely new issues will be raised in the
future on resale and/or recycling practices,
and this one will arise in a decade or so:
since the A380, composite materials have
made their appearance in this field, bringing
with them the properties that unquestionably make them so essential in aircraft
construction. What about disassembling
and recycling these aircraft?
The day it becomes necessary to disassemble an Airbus A350 or a Boeing 787
Dreamliner, what will happen? This remains
an open question, because it is still too soon
to have enough feedback from these types
of action.
Airbus is already taking a close look at the
maintenance of composite materials: how
to repair a cracked wing when it is made
of composites? As yet, there are no established procedures for the maintenance of
composite materials. Over the next decade,
solutions for recycling the increasingly large
range and number of composite aircraft
parts will no doubt be found, such as grinding or fibre separation.
More information:
www.aero-bay.com

http://www.aero-bay.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #112 - April/May 2017