AFRA Publishes Aircraft Recycling Best Practices Guide

The Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association (AFRA), based in Washington, D.C., has published a Best Management Practices (BMP) Guide for the recycling of aircraft materials.

The association also announced the first AFRA accreditations under its new BMP have been awarded to ELG Metals, Los Angeles, and Huron Valley Fritz West of Tucson.

The accreditations and new BMPs were announced during the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries’ 2012 Convention and Trade Show held in April in Las Vegas.

AFRA says the accreditation assures that recycling facilities operate in a safe and environmentally responsible fashion and allow businesses to find sustainable solutions.

According to AFRA, aircraft recyclers represent a growing portion of its membership, and the guide is designed to help them capture the maximum value from aircraft at the end of their service, by increasing the amounts of materials that can be recycled and raising the overall residual value of the materials used for aircraft.

The guide has been developed by AFRA members, including aircraft and aircraft parts manufacturers, maintenance companies, leasing operations and disassembly companies.

AFRA’s deputy director Bill Carberry, who is also a strategy analyst with Boeing Commercial Airlines, played an integral role in helping to develop the guide. “Our idea was to have an industry-prescribed document to set the standards for how aircraft should be taken apart in an environmentally responsible way,” Carberry says. He notes that the document provides training, tools and guidelines to help ensure that disassembly occurs in the proper order.

A further objective, Carberry says, is to recover aircraft-grade materials so they can be recycled yet still remain within the aerospace industry. “That was a strong objective,” he says.

“The whole AFRA effort is to improve the end value of aircraft materials, and Boeing really supports that,” Carberry says.

AFRA says the new BMP Guide has been incorporated into its accreditation program, adding aircraft materials recycling to an already extensive list of retired aircraft management activities that were built into previous versions of the program. The guide will be used to review and audit a recycler’s facilities, procedures and documents, which are assessed and monitored by an independent auditor on an ongoing basis.

AFRA is a not-for-profit association with 57 members from 16 countries.