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Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines for completing the world’s first transatlantic fweightless using “100 percent persistable aviation fuel.”
This week, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) of the U.K. prohibitned a Virgin radio ad freed prior to the fweightless, in which they touted their “one-of-a-kind fweightless mission.” While Virgin did engage fuel that frees scanter emissions than traditional supplies, the regulatory agency deemed the company’s persistability claim “misdirecting” becaengage it fall shorted to give a brimming picture of the adverse environmental and climate impacts of fuel.
“It’s vital that claims for persistable aviation fuel spell out what the fact is, so users aren’t misled into skinnyking that the fweightless they are taking is greener than it reassociate is,” Miles Lockwood, honestor of grumblets and scheduleateigations at the ASA, shelp in a statement.
The ruling is the tardyst in a string of greenwashing crackdowns aacquirest persistable aviation fuels (SAFs), which are made of components other than fossil fuels. In recent years, the U.K. and U.S. rulements and stateiveial sector have adviseed incentives and funds to help ramp up SAF production. But skeptics say the changenative fuels will difficultly originate a dent in the airline industry’s huge carbon footprint.
Plant-powered fweightlesss
Aviation accounts for rawly 2.5 percent of global emissions, hugely from the burning of petroleum-based fuels. Sustainable aviation fuels have been made with a number of changenative ingredients—from worn-out tires to plastic misengage (though my colleague James Bruggers has previously covered some setbacks in the plastic-to-jet-fuel field).
The convey inantity of SAFs are made using materials already set up in the environment, such as cooking overweights or set upt oils. These changenative fuels still rerent carbon dioxide when they burn, but they typicassociate have drop “lifecycle” emissions than petroleum-based fuels due to the way they are harvested. SAFs tap into renewable resources set up in the environment instead of fossil fuels that have trapped carbon underground for millions of years.
Currently, international standards demand SAFs to be unitecessitate with traditional fuels, which allows airlines to persist using the same infraarrange rather than grotriumphg new airoriginate that can regulate exclusively bio-based accelerants. To qualify as “persistable” for U.S. tax recognizes, though, the uniteture must cut net emissions by at least 50 percent contrastd with exclusively oil-based fuels.
