Collins Aerospace’s facilities in the Asia-Pacific region account for many of the renewable energy and other resource-efficiency initiatives it has implemented across its industrial base as part of a focus on improving aerospace’s environmental-sustainability performance.

A commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions represents one of three major avenues to which Collins has turned its attention, according to LeAnn Ridgeway, the company's chief sustainability officer.

Collins’s participation in the industrywide effort to become wholly environmentally sustainable by 2050 represents another avenue. Together with Airbus and Boeing, Collins is a member of the International Aerospace Environmental Group’s Work Group 11, established to develop the specific standards required for the industry to meet its 2050 net-zero carbon goal. The technologies Collins itself can develop to improve efficiency throughout aviation and aerospace accounts for the third avenue, according to Ridgeway.

In improving the sustainability footprint of its own industrial base, Collins has implemented eight solar-generated electrical power initiatives. Of those, it has installed four on-site solar-power stations at its facilities in Singapore and it uses electricity from one off-site installation in India to help power its factories there, said Ridgeway.

Collins maintains “a big footprint” in India in terms of industrial capacity and at least 15 percent of all the electrical power its Indian facilities use comes from solar energy sources, she said. Collins plans to keep increasing the proportion of solar-generated electricity those facilities use as India’s solar-generated power infrastructure matures. It also carries out “a lot of water recycling” there. “We have zero water discharge in India,” said Ridgeway.

In Malaysia, which sees a lot of rain, Collins uses harvesting systems on the roofs of its facilities to catch and store water. The harvested water then gets used for sanitary and cooling purposes. The company reduced its water use in Malaysia by 46 percent in just one year, from 2020 to 2021, she said.

Meanwhile, at its facility in Bandung, Indonesia, Collins has seen its annual water usage fall by 270,000 gallons since it implemented several “green” programs there, according to Ridgeway. The facility has reduced its annual electricity use by 600 kilowatts and now emits 450 fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

The company has also installed solar heat blinds over all the window exteriors in its Australian facilities to reduce the electrical power needed for cooling in the country’s hot summers and has installed LED lighting in the facilities, further reducing its power requirement in Australia.

Meanwhile, it has implemented water-containment measures to prevent any chemical spillage from its Australian facilities, according to Ridgeway. To comply with the UK’s REACH regulations restricting the manufacture and use of dangerous chemicals, the company has spent $35 million to date on developing alternative, less-harmful chemicals for its industrial use globally.

Collins continues to study the possibilities for renewable-power use at all its facilities worldwide and soon “will come up with a base plan” to maximize the use of renewable power at every one of them, she said.

The company’s efforts to improve its sustainability footprint have met with considerable success. Since 2015, Collins has reduced its annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 37 percent; it has achieved a 25 percent reduction of water use globally; and it produces 35 percent less hazardous waste, said Ridgeway.

The company expects to realize considerable further reductions in energy use and various emissions measures from its ‘Shut It Off’ program, according to Ridgeway. The program is analyzing all of Collins’s industrial activities to identify where and when it can turn off machines and facility-infrastructure power without affecting production capacity.

Ridgeway cited a wide variety of opportunities throughout the company to develop technologies and processes that will contribute to improving the sustainability performance of the aviation and aerospace industries. For instance, she said, Collins Information Systems Group (CISG)—which includes aeronautical communications network provider ArincDirect and recently acquired FlightAware—has begun developing a system to optimize forecasting of flight arrival times and reduce the time aircraft spend taxiing and at the gate.

CISG is also developing an AI-based predictive-analytics system to provide optimal routings for flights in real-time and—with the help of the Flightkeys flight-planning engine Collins now uses—dynamic route optimization, to allow pilots to modify flight plans in the air to take advantage of changing weather and traffic conditions.

Another recent Collins acquisition, Dutch Thermoplastic Components, will give the aerospace industry four sustainability enhancements in one, according to Ridgeway. The materials in the advanced thermoplastic composite aerostructures the company makes don’t require the energy-intensive cold storage that today’s thermoset composite structures need. Nor do thermoplastic airframe components need curing with heat treatment in energy-hungry autoclaves.

Additionally, Dutch Thermoplastic Components parts weigh 20 to 50 percent less than the thermoset or metal aerostructures they replace, reducing aircraft fuel burn, she said. Thermoplastic components also better resist impact and fatigue than either thermoset or metal parts, “keeping stuff out of landfills” by being longer-lived and requiring less-frequent replacement.