In aviation, the future of sustainability demands tangible results
In just under a month, Midstream’s aviation team will be touching down in Dubai for the 21st annual Airport Show. And as we put the final touches on our plans, I’ve naturally been spending a lot of time thinking about the aviation sector as a whole.
Over the past decade, sustainability has become one of the biggest issues – and arguably the biggest – shaping the future of aviation. We’ve all seen the stories about the environmental impact of airports, and there’s no shortage of issues that the industry (rightly) needs to address. At the same time, I think there’s a real danger that the concept of sustainability is beginning to lose its impact due to the way in which it’s discussed.
Sustainable actions are a good thing, which is a statement that I think just about anyone can agree. But sustainability as a topic can also be quite vague, an all-encompassing theme that can cover everything from bio-diversity through to carbon emissions. As a result, it’s all too easy to think about sustainability as some monolithic challenge that will take years – if not decades – to address successfully.
The reality is very different. Everything we can do to mitigate the threat of climate change makes a difference, and the sooner we start doing it, the more impact it has. I think that this is where companies like Midstream have a real responsibility to their customers – not just in terms of our products, but in the way we communicate their benefits.
Rather than talking in vague terms about how we can help airports become more sustainable, we need to provide concrete facts that explain exactly what we can do. Your airport has a goal of being carbon neutral by 2040? Great, here are the real steps that we can take today that will help you start to move towards that goal.
Driving action through accuracy
As you can probably tell, the tangibility of product performance is something that we’re quite passionate about at Midstream. When we won the Sustainability category at the Inter Airport Europe Awards late last year, it was for the very specific fact that our Modus Tower Series lights can reduce typical energy consumption at airfields by as much as 70%. It’s hard numbers like those that I believe suppliers to the aviation sector need to commit to.
In Dubai, we’ll be showing two other products from our Modus line – the 450 and R1000 floodlights. Both have been specifically designed with the demands of aviation environments in mind, and are capable of delivering significant energy savings while simultaneously improving the quality of an airport’s lighting.
What does that mean? Simply that, when we sit down to talk about the contribution that we can make to an airport’s sustainability targets, we can be incredibly specific about the impact that we can deliver. Through our complimentary design service, we can say with an incredibly high degree of accuracy exactly how much we can help them reduce their energy consumption by, and how fast we can help them achieve net zero as a result.
If that sounds like the kind of discussion you’d like to have around sustainability – one that focuses on real actions, and real results – then we’d love to meet you in Dubai. Why not drop by our stand at 3002.