Bringing together regions, cultures and economies with flights to over 300 destinations in five continents, Turkish Airlines continues to open its wings for the future of our world.

In 2021, the global brand prevented tens of thousands of trees from being cut and hundreds of thousands of cubic metre of water from being contaminated with its sustainability operations with four focal points: humanity, world, improvement, and management function.

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Dr Ahmet Bolat

Campaigning against the environmental problems facing our world at every area, the flag carrier’s latest initiative was to use environmentally-friendly fuel during its Istanbul – Paris flight in February. The global brand plans to increase the frequencies and destinations that use this fuel which is now being used on one flight per week for Paris, Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, London, and Stockholm flights.

On their ‘environmentalist’ operations, Turkish Airlines Chairman of the Board and the Executive Committee, Professor Dr Ahmet Bolat stated that protecting the future of regions that possess unique beauty with their natural, historical, financial, or cultural assets is a significant matter for the Turkish Airlines family. He said that while carrying many to these wonders every day, they also wish to carry these rare works of the world to the future, intact.

With this perspective, we are optimising all of our operations with sustainable endeavours and protect our world for the future generations. Turkish Airlines will continue to fly in the blue of the sky for the green of the ground.

Recycled rainwater

As the region’s foremost MRO company with their technical abilities, Turkish Technic promises a more environmentally-conscious future with its renewed facilities. Turkish Technic’s C/D hangar, one of the service locations of the company and Turkiye’s biggest aircraft maintenance facility under one roof, stores rainwater and turns it into usable water. This water, which is stored and treated via a rainwater collection system, are then used all over the facility for day-to-day use. They process water instead of drawing water from the city’s water supplies. In 2021, 54% of the facility’s water usage was met with rainwater.

Getting over US$1 billion in revenue from its 2021 operations, Turkish Technic makes a significant contribution to Turkiye’s exports while ensuring that by treating the water that was used during their operations, the company prevented wasting 1.471 million litres of water, which was equivalent to usage of 59,000 people! On top of that, the successful brand also prevented 6,710 trees from being cut by recycling 632 tonnes of non-hazardous waste and ensured 39,119 m3 of soil stayed clean by recovery of 700 tonnes of hazardous waste.

Carrying Uganda’s economy to the future

As the fastest growing brand of global cargo sector, Turkish Cargo supports the projects that ease international trade in accordance with its sustainability strategy. It supports the Uganda Project, one of the projects under The Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, which aims to improve and grow the export of Uganda. Turkish Cargo provides training support for Ugandan personnel, sharing its operational experience to contribute towards digitalisation and improvement in capacity for the air cargo sector in Uganda.

Approximately 38,000 km everyday on electric vehicles!

Turkish Ground Services (TGS) possesses 309 electric vehicles in nine airports located in Istanbul and Anatolia and that number is rising every day. Ranging from pushback vehicles that move aircraft to baggage tractors, electric vehicles contribute to environmentally conscious operations of TGS. When the daily active hours of vehicles are counted, they collectively travel approximately 38,000 km everyday, almost the circumference of earth!

The company’s environmentalist actions are not limited to this either. Working with zero waste goal on all of its work processes, ground services operator prevented 2,152 tonnes of hazardous and 294 tonnes of non-hazardous waste from being mixed with nature in 2021, just on the airports in Istanbul.

Fuel-saving efforts

The biggest returns for the environmentalist operations of Turkish Airlines comes from their fuel saving efforts. By productively adapting processes such as single engine taxi methods, route optimisations and flight centre of gravity during planning to operations, the flag carrier saved 37,820 tonnes of fuel and prevented 116,809 tonnes of carbon emissions from being released to the atmosphere in 2021. This was equivalent to 292,000 trees being planted or 473 flights between Istanbul and New York using a wide body aircraft.

Operating with one of the world’s youngest fleets, Turkish Airlines further aims to increase its fuel-saving by enhancing its fleet with new generation aircraft.


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