UK airport group introduces biodegradable security bag

Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton have become the first airports in the UK to trial a new Oxo-Biodegradable 100ml security bag.

All three are operated by AGS Airports Ltd, which believes that the new, free, bags will now remove more than two million single-use plastic bags each year across the group.

The technology involved ensures the product will begin to degrade over a selected period of time – between 17 and 24 months of a bag’s lifespan – down to a natural bio-mass rather than the more damaging micro-plastics associated with single-use alternatives. Each bag can also be reused and recycled prior to the beginning of the degrading period.

Mark Johnston, chief operating officer at AGS Airports Ltd, says: “Finding a suitable alternative that met both our security and operational requirements while retaining the necessary resilience the bags require was a challenge, so we’re really pleased to be able to trial a product that can not only be re-used and recycled, but also provides our passengers with the assurance that they are also supporting our efforts to support the environment.”

The switch to Oxo-Biodegradable security bags is the latest sustainable initiative introduced to help reduce AGS Airports Ltd’s carbon footprint.

Last year, Glasgow became the first airport to introduce a fleet of three Scottish-built full electric buses to its operation and invested more than £200,000 to deploy eight of petrol/electric plug-in hybrid Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV 4×4 vehicles across its airfield operations.

The group has also joined over 200 airports across Europe in signing ACI Europe’s NetZero 2050 pledge; a commitment to achieving net zero for the carbon under our control by 2050.

At a UK level, AGS is a signatory to Sustainable Aviation’s decarbonisation roadmap which is the first national net zero aviation commitment anywhere in the world. The Oxo-Biodegradable plastic bags have been introduced in partnership with Enviro-Point, a subsidiary of airport service company Luggage-Point.

Each year more than eight million tonnes of single use plastic ends up in our oceans and seas and it can take up to 500 years for a single plastic bag to degrade.

Using Oxo-Biodegradable (d2w) in the normal manufacturing process of plastics accelerates the natural process of oxidation. Oxidation reduces the molecular weight of the polymer in a much shorter timescale, until it is no longer a plastic and can be gradually bio-assimilated by bacteria and fungi on land and in the ocean.