Austrian oil and gas group OMV (Vienna; www.omv.com) is converting used disposable plastic cups into synthetic crude at its recently opened pilot recycling facility in Schwechat / Austria. The cups are provided by Austrian Airlines (Schwechat; www.austrian.com).

Since the end of 2018, Austrian Airlines flight attendants have been separating the plastic cups used by passengers from the rest of the waste – around 1m were collected between January and March 2019. A disposal company then cleans and shreds the cups before delivering the material to OMV’s “ReOil” facility. The ReOil plant uses thermal cracking to convert the plastics waste into synthetic crude, which OMV then processes in its Schwechat refinery into fuel or other plastics raw materials – see Plasteurope.com of 01.10.2018. OMV said 100 kg of used plastics can produce 100 litres of synthetic crude. Each cup comes in at 2.5 g.

Austrian Airlines and parent company Lufthansa have been carrying out a project called “Fly greener” to reduce waste and mitigate the environmental impact from items consumed by passengers during a flight. For several years, the Austrian airline has been sorting various materials on board and sending them for recycling, including PET and glass bottles, beverage cartons, cans, paper and newspapers.