An Investigation and Benchmarking Model for Developing Sustainable Material Use Among Turkish Airport Operators

Sustainable material use refers to the capacity of a material to be utilized in a way that does not deplete the Earth’s natural resources or harm the ecosystem. This lowering might entail employing renewable or recyclable materials and reducing the overall quantity of material utilized in airport services. Renewable materials, recyclable materials, biodegradable materials, reusable materials, low-impact materials (low-emission materials), natural materials, and non-toxic materials are sustainable materials used in airports. There are 58 civil airports operated in Turkiye. The public information on the airport operators’ websites can assess sustainable material use in these airports. There are ten different airport operator groups present in Turkiye. This study offered a novel scoring system called CACS which stands for Clarity, Accessibility, Continuity, and Suitability, to retrieve sustainable material use from sustainability reports of airport operators. The model proposed in this paper will help the readers benchmark a group of airports not present in the literature. The results show that İGA airport is the highest score among the ten airports, followed by TAV airports at 820.6 and 256.3, respectively. The top five airports encapsulate 97.44% after the Normalization of passenger counts of Turkiye. Airport operators’ sustainable material usage and other sustainability benchmarking on numerous domains based on sustainability reporting systems would draw the public and increase awareness, allowing operator firms and airport authorities to concentrate on creating a more livable future.