Orlando International Airport
is taking steps toward becoming a more greener environment.
If Orlando International Airport was a city, it would rank as Central Florida’s second-largest, boasting a population of 104,000 daily passengers and 18,000 workers.
The airport has three fire stations, 52 restaurants, 66 stores and 762 toilets. Each day, 7,200 cars arrive to park as 450 jets take off. It pumps a million gallons of jet fuel daily, it’s one of Orlando’s biggest consumer of electricity, and it has nearly as much land as Winter Park, Eatonville, Maitland and Longwood combined.
With its ravenous appetite for energy, water and other resources, and as a prodigious contributor to greenhouse gases that scientists fear will bring disastrous warming of the planet, Orlando International wants to make its environmental footsteps greener.
“We have an obligation to do that not only for our own community but to show the world that we care,” said Jeff Daniels, assistant director of maintenance operations. “And I know the world notices.”
More than feel-good endeavors, Daniels said the airport has begun to tame eye-popping power bills that balloon from $1.4 million a month in cooler weather to $1.8 million a month during the summer.
One step has been the replacement of two-thirds of 150,000 old-fashioned lights with energystingy LED varieties.
As the nation’s 13th-busiest airport and with passenger counts rising, it cut water usage to 237 million gallons in 2014 from 257 million gallons in 2010. Also in 2014, airport workers recycled 3.6 million pounds of glass, cans and other material.
Operations director Tom Draper pointed out that the new “cellphone lots,” with hundreds of parking places, bathrooms and flight monitors, serve a bigger role than initially apparent. The lots lessen the amount of gasoline burned by people who would otherwise circle the airport waiting to pick up passengers, he said.
Justin Towles, vice president at American Association of Airport Executives, said airports get that their environmental obligations are challenging.
“We have massive swaths of paved land, we’re launching multiton, commercial jets
utilizing thousands of gallons of jet fuel and they are just massive facilities,” Towles said. “Not just the airport industry but the aviation industry on the whole take it very seriously.”
Airports across the nation are trying to become more green.
Since 2010, several California airports followed by those in Atlanta and Boston have secured LEED building certification, a designation by the U.S. Green Building Council for progressive construction and operation.
Chicago O’Hare International has “aeroponic” gardens — growing plants in nutrified solutions rather than soil — as well as an apiary of 75 beehives and a dozen “green” rooftops.
New York’s John F. Kennedy International farms vegetables and herbs for food banks.
Miami International teamed last year with a Florida Power & Light Co. subsidiary to invest $32 million in revamping lights, air conditioning, plumbing and other infrastructure to reap $40 million in reduced energy within 14 years.
While Orlando International has a minuscule amount of solar energy, Denver International’s solar plant cranks out 10 megawatts. That’s nearly as much as produced by Orlando Utilities Commission, which, like the airport, is city-owned.
Last year, Tampa Electric Co. mounted solar panels on a Tampa International parking garage able to produce 2 megawatts.
Portland International boasts of having 42 charging stations for electric cars; Orlando International has nine.
With passenger counts rising at nearly 7 percent a year, Orlando’s airport is targeting nearly $3 billion worth of improvements and expansions that would double the developed extent of a complex that began its modern existence 35 years ago.
For that growth, the airport has several initiatives tailored to its specific assets and challenges.
“Some things that work really well in other places might not work here as well, like the green roofs that work really well in Chicago but not here,” said Daniels, assistant director of maintenance operations.
Daniels is part of efforts to get LEED certification for 6 million square feet of building space.
Certifying existing buildings is “very unusual” and deserves kudos, said Alexa Stone, president of ecoPreserve, a recipient last year of an airport “Rising Star” for its environmental consulting.
Also under construction with LEED standards, and for a cost of nearly $700 million, is a parking garage and infrastructure for buses, taxis, All Aboard Florida, SunRail, maglev and the airport tram.
Another of the airport’s initiatives is its Green Team of 100 airport and community volunteers, who advise and coordinate between airlines, concessionaires and the public.
“They are the voice of sustainability,” said JudithAnn Jarrette, airport manager of noise abatement and sustainability.