One piece of paper is practically a feather on its own (super light), but stack 10,000 pieces of paper together and suddenly you’ve got one heavy a$$ load. True?
The guys over at United Airlines did the same math and found that if they lighten the amount of paper on flights, they can actually save a whole lot on fuel.
What kind of paper is United using on its planes?
Yeah, we thought the same thing until it clicked to us – inflight magazines.
Last year, the airline decided to switch the paper used in its inflight Hemisphere magazine to a lighter variety, which decreased the inflight weight to 28 grams a copy and led to a saving of 643,520l of fuel, LA Times reported.
That’s huge!
According to the carrier, the saving in fuel cost was the equivalent to paying a few pilots’ annual salaries.
As well as the reduced paper weight, the airline managed to save 1.4 millions of gallons o fuel ever year by removing duty-free items from its planes, a tactic Qantas adopted at the start of 2018.
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