Moving away from single-use cups in our airport lounges

That's a fair question. Air New Zealand's greatest challenge is to decarbonise its operations and this primarily means moving away from the fossil fuels we rely on to fly our planes. This is a very difficult task and while there are currently few options available to us, we are working hard with domestic and global stakeholders to find and accelerate decarbonisation opportunities.

However, waste also contributes to our carbon footprint but unlike decarbonisation, managing waste is within our direct control.

The plastic water cups we have on our flights are made from recyclable PET (1) plastic and can be recycled off all our domestic flights. To reduce single-use water cups, customers are welcome to bring their own reusable cups with lids on board flights.  

For international flights, Air New Zealand launched a more sustainable serviceware offering in October 2022 that reduced single-use fossil-fuel derived plastic items across all cabins by 52.6 percent.   

We are currently scoping new domestic and international waste targets to accelerate our waste minimisation efforts and are always on the lookout for more sustainable alternatives to further reduce our single-use plastic use. We will look to transition out remaining inflight single-use plastic as new innovations are developed that meet our operational requirements. 

Along with the single-use cups that we're removing, the single-serve spreads are one of the few remaining single-use plastic items customers will see in our lounges.  

We have been trialling reusable options this year, however, single-serve spread packaging is currently the only operationally viable option for our high traffic lounges. Because of this, we are now working with our suppliers to investigate opportunities for these products to have more sustainable packaging. 

No, this is about reducing waste. Your hot drink will still be available – we just want you to have it in our lounge or use a reusable cup with lid if you'd like to take it away.

Yes, the only thing that is changing is that we will no longer have single-use cups in our lounges.

At this stage we will be removing single-use cups from lounges in New Zealand, including our international lounges. We're also currently scoping removal of single-use cups in our lounges in Australia, Fiji, and the Cook Islands.

Yes. At the moment Air New Zealand is using over 10 million single-use cups every year. Reducing this number will reduce waste to landfill. 

As much as we can, Air New Zealand is trying to move away from single-use products in our operations. Many of these products take valuable resources to make and are only used for a few minutes before being disposed of. Where we can use more sustainable and reusable options we should.

Of course.  As long as your reusable cup has a lid, you're welcome to bring a self-service or barista made hot drink on board your flight. 

We're more than happy to refill your reusable cup inflight. Please note, our cabin crew do not have the facilities available to rinse your cup.

Unlike our other New Zealand lounges, Christchurch Regional Express does not currently have the infrastructure to allow for a reusable offering.

Reusable models reduce lifecycle environmental impact. The added weight of reusable cups on our aircraft compared to single-use cups is not sufficiently material to negate the wider benefits of reusing a cup again and again. Air New Zealand is working hard to reduce our emissions through more impactful measures.