Clean living: The high stakes of airport trash collecting
On a recent Friday, 112 workers equipped with safety vests and garbage bags combed the airside areas around Toronto Pearson’s terminals. The volunteers – many of them from airlines and ground services companies – were looking for litter, and no item was too small for their attention. They removed scraps of paper, empty water bottles, shards of plastic and other items that can fall or be blown onto the ground at a busy airport.
In aviation terminology, these are known as Foreign Object Debris, or FOD. “It’s often little things, like zippers from luggage or a piece of metal from a ground vehicle,” says Graham Smith, Pearson’s Airfield Maintenance Manager.
The collection blitz, called a FOD walk, is part of an elaborate system of checks to keep the airfield clean. Because when it comes to airports, one person’s trash isn’t another’s treasure – it’s a hazard.
Small objects, big deal
Modern airplane engines are incredibly powerful. The turbofans on a Boeing 777 are as wide as a bus and can draw in more than 1,300 kilograms of air per second. The blast from such an engine can turn any nearby loose object into a projectile, potentially damaging aircraft and putting workers at risk of injury.
The dangers are real: globally, FOD costs the aviation industry more than $8 billion annually in repairs and delays. That’s why Toronto Pearson has a comprehensive strategy for detecting and removing it.
Keeping trash at bay
Keeping the airport clean takes constant vigilance. Although there are procedures in place for minimizing FOD, the constant movement of equipment around the airfield means there is always potential for small items to drop.
To detect them quickly, maintenance crews inspect runways and aprons multiple times a day. Ground staff also check gate areas before aircraft arrive.
But not everything can be spotted easily by the human eye. So, maintenance teams conduct regular airfield patrols with specialized machines that pick up any debris in their path. These include vehicles similar to street sweepers and large magnets that are towed behind trucks to pick up small metal fragments.
“Our team is out there working shifts from early in the morning to late at night, covering the entire airport,” says Smith.
The future
One of the biggest challenges in dealing with FOD is the vast scale of modern airports. Toronto Pearson has 15 kilometres of runways and a campus that’s the size of 12,500 hockey arenas.
With so much ground to cover, airports around the world are looking at how technology could support their maintenance teams. Innovations under development include radar-based systems that can detect objects as small as a few millimetres in diameter and artificial intelligence software to analyze video footage of airfields for signs of debris.
While these are intriguing and promising ideas, the FOD walk is likely to remain a fixture in the calendar for years to come.
“There’s pride and ownership in getting outside with everyone pitching in,” says Smith. “These events help us build community as we come together as a team.”
