What proportion of an aircraft cannot be reused, repurposed or recycled?

While previous endeavours have attempted to tackle this question, they have often focused on isolated aspects of the process. The objective of our programme is to comprehensively study an Airbus A320 aircraft from the moment it lands to its eventual disassembly and recycling.

This holistic approach will involve weighing the aircraft at several intervals throughout the process, as well as measuring all components removed as part of the disassembly phase.  

We have gained the support of the original owner, the parts company that commissions the disassembly, recycling companies, and weighing service providers to support the realisation of this programme.

This will enable us to document each stage of the process, and finally record the material recycling of the hull. The resulting data will serve as a baseline for our future initiatives and will facilitate informed discussions on our journey towards achieving a 100% reuse, repurposed & recycled aircraft.

We recognise that today's disassembly outcomes reflect yesterday's design choices. Therefore, understanding this journey through data analysis can significantly influence the industry's approach to designing the next generation of aircraft for optimal recyclability.

Having already gained the support of AFRA for this initiative; we intend to share our findings with them and potentially IAEG. AFRA see this piece of work as pivotal in their mission to create baselines to measure against and most importantly improve from. AFRA will help fund the weighing element of the activity.  

The results can you read in the this paper.