Mentour Now looks at aircraft dismantling and why the carbon fibre composites of the 787 and A350 are much harder to recycle than aluminium.
What the video covers
Written in our own words. It only describes what the video shows and says.What happens to a retired airliner
Every year hundreds of commercial jets make their final flight, to storage sites in the deserts of Arizona and California or to dismantling facilities in Europe and elsewhere. The presenter, Ben Watts, explains that these aircraft graveyards are far more organised than the name suggests: a whole industry recovers the value that is left, with standards for the traceability of removed components and for recycling what remains. Aircraft are retired for many reasons, from age, fuel prices and maintenance costs to bankruptcies, collapsing demand or damage that is not worth repairing, and sometimes a young aircraft is worth more as a source of spares, as with some A320neos and A220s grounded by the Pratt and Whitney GTF issue. Specialists first remove the engines, landing gear, APU, avionics, flight controls and thousands of other parts, and drain fuel, oil, hydraulic fluid and other hazardous materials before the structure is cut up.
Aluminium can be recycled again and again
The structure of a conventional airliner is mostly aluminium, which can be recycled over and over. Recyclers sort it into alloy families, because different alloys are used throughout the airframe, then clean, shred and melt it so it re-enters the metals industry. Recycling needs far less energy than producing new aluminium from ore. The caveat is that the skin of an old 737 will not necessarily become the skin of a new one, since aerospace specifications are demanding and separating alloys is complex, so recycled aircraft aluminium often ends up in less demanding products such as soda cans.
The carbon fibre problem of the 787 and A350
In the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350, composites make up around half of the structural weight. Carbon fibre reinforced plastic combines layers of very thin carbon fibres with a polymer resin, cured under pressure in an autoclave, giving a light, stiff structure without the fatigue and corrosion issues of aluminium. That resin is a thermoset: once cured it cannot be melted down and reshaped, and with enough heat it decomposes instead. Cutting up a composite fuselage simply leaves smaller pieces of cured carbon fibre. Grinding gives short fibres for use as filler, a clear downgrade, while pyrolysis and solvolysis can recover better fibres at higher cost and complexity. Clean factory offcuts are already reused, for example for bicycle frames in France, but a retired airliner is covered in paint, adhesives, fasteners, lightning protection and repairs. The video points to wind turbine blades, also made of fibres in thermoset resin, many of which have been cut up and buried in landfill. With the 787 in service since 2011 and the A350 since 2015, the presenter says the open question is whether recycling can become economical in time, and whether replacements for the 737 and A320 might use thermoplastics that are easier to rework.
