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Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines by completing the world's first transatlantic flight using “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”
This week, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned a pre-flight radio advert from Virgin in which the company touted its “unique flight mission”. While Virgin did indeed use fuel that produces fewer emissions than traditional fuels, the regulator deemed the company’s sustainability claim “misleading” because it failed to fully reflect the negative impact of fuel on the environment and climate.
“It is important that sustainable aviation fuel claims reflect reality so that consumers are not misled into thinking the flight they take is greener than it actually is,” Miles Lockwood, the ASA’s director of complaints and investigations, said in a statement.
The ruling is the latest in a series of greenwashing moves against sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), which are made from components other than fossil fuels. In recent years, the British and American governments and the private sector have offered incentives and funding to ramp up SAF production. But sceptics say the alternative fuels will make little dent in the aviation industry's large carbon footprint.
Flights with a plant as propulsion
Aviation accounts for about 2.5 percent of global emissions, largely from burning petroleum-based fuels. Sustainable aviation fuels are made from a number of alternative ingredients, from worn-out tires to plastic waste (although my colleague James Bruggers has previously covered some of the plastic-to-jet fuel setbacks).
Most SAFs are made from materials that are already in the environment, such as cooking fats or vegetable oils. These alternative fuels still emit carbon dioxide when they burn, but they typically have lower “life cycle” emissions than petroleum-based fuels because of the way they are harvested. SAFs use renewable resources that are already in the environment instead of fossil fuels that have locked up carbon underground for millions of years.
Currently, international standards require that SAFs be blended with conventional fuels, allowing airlines to continue using the same infrastructure rather than developing new aircraft that can only use bio-based accelerators. However, to qualify as “sustainable” for U.S. tax credits, the blend must reduce net emissions by at least 50 percent compared to oil-based fuels alone.
