How to: Keep Climbing and Flying Towards New Heights! (A Pilot Study)

I had the pleasure and honor of combining efforts with fellow UGA seniors this semester for our capstone project. These girls started as just any other group members, but we quickly bonded through our passion to embed sustainable initiatives within every sector of our lives, even at an avian corporation as grand and powerful as Delta Air Lines. 

In this day and age, everywhere you go you leave some sort of footprint, whether it be considered harmful or beneficial. We don't have to stop flying or living like we do now, but maybe there is a way that we can work with the environment instead of against it! Some of the greatest pleasures of life are to travel, connect, learn, and to keep climbing for better. If everyone is going to leave a footprint behind, why don’t we make the ones we leave behind green?

Our capstone with Delta Air Lines focused on researching the potential of sustainable aviation fuel, or SF, in Georgia. SAF is produced from renewable or sustainable materials and emits fewer harmful emissions. Nothing but love to my girl Taylor, but before she re-releases another album and continues her 8-year tour, we wanted to ensure everyone, including the Taylors of the world fly SAFely.

Delta Air Lines pledged to move towards a more sustainable future with a Net Zero carbon emissions goal by 2050. To help reach this goal, they have committed to replacing 10% of their conventional jet fuel with SAF by the end of 2030. Delta understands the importance of reducing carbon emissions while also wanting to help humans do what they do best-- discovering! 

Our project investigated using waste streams of used cooking oil (UCO) and animal fats (Tallow/Lard) for SAF production. Our goal was to assess how much more SAF could be produced from these waste streams. To do this, Jordan and Jasmine interviewed professors, multiple fast-food restaurants, and used cooking oil collectors to assess our feedstock. Ashleigh and I interviewed and surveyed professors, farmers, and processors to look into animal fat waste. 

Most farmers, processors, restaurant owners, and used cooking oil collectors we talked to love the idea of a circular economy rather than a linear one, so why don’t we tie the great economy of the state of GA into working together to promote sustainable flying? Bet you didn’t realize that the bAcOn GrEaSe we all love on our biscuits and the used cooking oil from our favorite KFC meals could fuel more than just our bodies...

Our time working on this project has been nothing short of an amazing learning experience, one that came with great challenges. Having no experience prior with the feedstocks, it has been an honor connecting with and learning from the processors, farmers, professors and people in the state of Georgia. I learned very quickly that I humbly know nothing when something comes out of my scope or expertise, but I learn the quickest and the best from people who speak so passionately about their scopes of expertise. 

My favorite part of this capstone was the storytelling and the connecting piece I was able to bring to the table of farmers and butchers. One of the most rewarding moments from this project was the facilitation of an open conversation between two vastly different people who believe in the importance of a circular economy. The second was how both sides listened attentively to one another to truly try and solve how both of us could and should reach our end goal of implementing sustainable initiatives. The conversations between the "little people" and the "top dogs" felt like a necessary gap to be building a bridge over, and I truly believe bridging that specific gap should be a social investment everywhere for every business.

A s a b u s i n e s s w o m a n, it does not seem the smartest to tune out some voices and turn up other ones. If we want to #KeepClimbing to new heights–we cannot destroy the mountains and obstacles we have to climb, we just have to find a way to fly around them ;)