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Airline Amenity Kit

Pouch with eight wrapped items

74
g
Total plastic weight

Eight separately wrapped items handed out per passenger, most of them untouched. Cabin waste rules mean nearly all of it is incinerated after one flight.

1%
Recycle probability
450
Years to decompose
Airline Amenity Kit

Material breakdown

3 components
  • Polyester pouch32g
  • Individual item wrappers22g
  • Toothbrush, comb and eye mask trim20g
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Production footprint

Per unit
0.87L
Water to produce
0.227kWh
Electricity to produce

Estimated upstream manufacturing footprint per unit, based on resin LCA averages.

Lower-impact alternatives

  • Decline the kit
    Bring your own eye mask and brush.
    0g
    plastic
  • Airline reuse programmes
    Some carriers now collect and reissue pouches.
    20g
    plastic
  • Paper-wrapped essentials only
    Fewer items, no plastic film.
    6g
    plastic
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References for this item

Peer-reviewed studies and institutional reports behind the figures above.

  • Degradation Rates of Plastics in the Environment
    Chamas, A., Moon, H., Zheng, J., Qiu, Y., Tabassum, T., Jang, J. H., Abu-Omar, M., Scott, S. L. & Suh, S. (2020) · ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 8(9), 3494–3511

    Open-access review that harmonises plastic degradation studies into a specific surface degradation rate, giving half-lives from 58 years for an HDPE bottle to 1,200 years for thick HDPE pipe. Peer-reviewed basis for how our decomposition windows scale with wall thickness and format.

  • Ranking environmental degradation trends of plastic marine debris based on physical properties and molecular structure
    Min, K., Cuiffi, J. D. & Mathers, R. T. (2020) · Nature Communications, 11, 727

    Ranks PE, PP, PET, PS, PVC and nylon by measured degradation susceptibility and shows that thickness, crystallinity and additives shift estimated lifetimes by one to two orders of magnitude. Backs our practice of scaling persistence by format rather than by polymer alone.

  • Monitoring polymer degradation under different conditions in the marine environment
    Beltrán-Sanahuja, A., Casado-Coy, N., Simó-Cabrera, L. & Sanz-Lázaro, C. (2020) · Environmental Pollution, 259, 113836

    Field study exposing PET, LDPE, HDPE, PP and PS in seawater, sediment and beach sand for nine months; conventional polymers lost under a few percent of their mass. Direct measured evidence for the very slow marine degradation behind our long persistence windows.

  • Alteration and progressive degradation of plastic waste in a Polish operational landfill analysed over 60 years
    Redko, V., Wolska, L., Cieślak-Piotrowicz, A. et al. (2024) · Communications Earth & Environment, 5, 563

    Excavated polyethylene bags and film buried for up to six decades in a working landfill and found only partial surface oxidation, not disappearance. Real-world confirmation that landfilled film persists far beyond the lifetimes often quoted.

All sources & methodology →