On the ground action

When most people think ‘Cathay’ they think flying, but there’s more to flying than the planes. From check-in to lounge services, baggage handling to in-flight catering, there’s a community of companies working to get you to your destination. Each has its own role to play, and each needs to manage its carbon footprint.

If you’ve flown Cathay, you’ve experienced the service of our airport-related companies. What you mightn’t have noticed are the emissions-reducing initiatives that are being introduced behind the scenes to help us serve a growing number of passengers while helping to cut down our climate impact. Having met a 5-year emissions reduction target in 2015, we’re currently working to reduce our airport-wide emissions by 10% by the year 2020. Our airport-related companies are helping us achieve this while delivering services on a massive scale.

Our catering company, Cathay Pacific Catering Services (CPCS), produced over 30 million meals for 74,000 flights in 2017 – that’s 83,000 meals a day. As you might imagine, all this food preparation and storage takes a lot of energy and water. In 2017, CPCS introduced new heating, chilling and ventilation systems that prevented 460 tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere – the equivalent of about 75 Hongkongers’ CO2 emissions for one year.

We don’t just transport passengers, we also transport cargo and sometimes extra special cargo. Cathay Pacific Services Limited (CPSL) handles cargo for 14 airlines at Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA), is the largest cargo terminal in the world. The amount of cargo it handled in 2017 increased by 15%, however due to its green initiatives, like using solar power in warehouses and switching thousands of older lights to LEDs, CO2 emissions fell.

Vogue Laundry Services processes 85 tonnes of laundry every day for 27 airlines and 33 hotels. That’s a lot of washing and a lot of dry-cleaning. Vogue has been using carbon-absorbing technology to improve its processes, resulting in a 15% reduction in emissions of one of the harmful gases that dry-cleaning releases into the environment.

From land to sky we set targets to help us reduce our carbon footprint. Want to see how we reduce emissions from our flights? Click here.