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For all the engineering sophistication that went into designing the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787, the question of what to do with them at the end of their lives was largely left unanswered. The focus, understandably, was on making them fly better. Recycling was somebody else’s problem, at some future point. That future point is now arriving, and the industry is only beginning to respond.
As that moment gets closer, the gap is becoming harder to ignore. In this article, Simple Flying looks at why it exists, how carbon fiber changed the rules of aircraft recycling, and what actually happens when these jets reach the end of their lives.
The Planes Built To Last – But Not To Be Recycled
The Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner are two of the most advanced commercial aircraft ever built. They are quieter, more fuel-efficient, and lighter than most jets that came before them. Airlines love them. Passengers love them. And the secret behind much of that performance is carbon fiber – a material that makes these jets stronger and lighter than traditional aluminum aircraft.
But there is a problem nobody talked much about when these planes were designed. Carbon fiber, for all its strengths in the air, is extraordinarily difficult to deal with on the ground – especially when an aircraft reaches the end of its life. With older aluminum jets, recyclers could strip the airframe down and melt the metal for reuse. According to Airways Magazine, that straightforward process simply does not work with composite materials. Carbon fiber cannot be remelted and recast like metal can, which means the entire recycling playbook the industry has relied on for decades needs to be rewritten.
What makes the A350 and 787 particularly unique – and particularly challenging – is the sheer volume of composite material in each airframe. Research published in MDPI shows that both aircraft are made of more than 50% composite materials by structural composition. To put that in perspective, the Airbus A380 – itself considered a modern aircraft – uses composites for just 25% of its structure. When these jets eventually retire, the majority of each airframe will have no clear, established path for what happens to it next.
Why Carbon Fiber Changes Everything
To understand why the A350 and 787 pose such a recycling problem, it helps to understand what carbon fiber actually is and why it behaves so differently from metal. Carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) is a material made of high-strength carbon fibers embedded in a polymer resin. The fibers and resin bond together chemically during a curing process, creating a structure that is extraordinarily strong and light. That chemical bond is also precisely what makes the material so difficult to deal with at the end of its life.
With aluminum, the recycling process is relatively straightforward: melt it down, and the metal can be recast into something new. Composites simply do not work that way. According to research published by the University of Porto in the Journal of Composites Science, thermoset composites – the type used in aerospace – cannot be reprocessed through heating. The resin chemically bonds with the fibers during manufacturing, and breaking those bonds typically causes fiber degradation. There is no equivalent of the furnace for carbon fiber. The three main recycling options that exist – mechanical grinding, thermal processes like pyrolysis, and chemical solvolysis – each come with serious limitations. Mechanical grinding shreds the material into short fragments, reducing fiber length to the point that the output is only useful as low-grade filler. Thermal processes can recover fibers, but at energy costs estimated at three to four times higher than aluminum recycling, and with tensile strength losses of up to 30%. Chemical methods are the most promising for preserving fiber quality, but remain expensive and difficult to scale industrially.
The other issue is what happens to the resin. The same MDPI research notes that in thermal recycling processes, the resin cannot be recovered at all – it is simply burned off or lost. That means even in the best-case scenario, recyclers are only recovering part of the material, and what they do recover is often downgraded. Airways Magazine notes that composite materials, unlike metals, cannot be remelted and recast, meaning the entire approach that made aircraft recycling economically viable for aluminum jets does not apply here. For a conventional aluminum-heavy aircraft, up to 85–90% of material by weight can typically be recovered. For a composite-heavy jet like the A350 or 787, that figure has no comparable equivalent today.
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The Numbers That Should Worry The Industry
The scale of what is coming is not a distant problem. According to the Wevolver report, between 6,000 and 8,000 aircraft are expected to reach the end of their service lives by 2030. A significant portion of those jets are composite-heavy widebodies. And while many of those retirements will involve older aluminum aircraft that the industry already knows how to handle, the early composite jets – including the first generation of 787s – are slowly approaching the end of their designed service windows.
Research from the University of Sydney, covered by ScienceDaily, projects that the annual accumulation of composite waste from aircraft and wind turbine industries alone could reach 840,300 tonnes by 2050 – the equivalent of 34 full stadiums – if suitable recycling methods are not adopted. That figure spans more than just aviation, but aircraft account for a major share. The MDPI study from the University of Porto notes that over 20,000 aircraft are expected to be retired within the next 20 years, and the proportion of those containing large volumes of composite material will only grow as newer-generation jets reach retirement age in the 2030s and 2040s.
What makes those numbers harder to absorb is the weight of the composite material in each individual aircraft. According to the same University of Porto research, the Boeing 787 alone contains around 70,500 pounds (32,000 kilograms) of carbon fiber reinforced polymer composites – translating to approximately 50,700 pounds (23,000 kilograms) of carbon fiber per aircraft. Multiply that by the number of 787s and A350s currently in service – both types are among the best-selling widebody jets in history – and the volume of composite material with no clear end-of-life pathway runs into the hundreds of thousands of tonnes.
What Actually Happens To A Retired Composite Jet Today
Shutterstock, Simple Flying
When any commercial aircraft reaches the end of its service life, it typically flies one last time to a storage and disassembly facility – often in a dry climate location like Teruel in Spain or the Mojave Desert in California, where the arid air slows corrosion. From there, the process follows a well-established sequence. As Airways Magazine describes it, fluids and hazardous materials are drained first, then high-value components – engines, landing gear, avionics, auxiliary power units – are removed and tested for reuse. These parts feed directly back into the aviation market, often at significant discounts compared to new components.
For a composite jet, the situation diverges sharply at that point. Once the reusable components have been stripped out, what is left is a large quantity of carbon fiber structure with no straightforward path forward. According to Quest Metals, current recycling technologies for composite materials remain immature, meaning recycling activities for these materials are less economically efficient and yield fewer environmental benefits than metal recycling. In practice, the composite portions of a retired aircraft are most commonly either sent to landfill or incinerated. In some cases, the material is mechanically shredded, and the resulting short fiber fragments are sold as low-grade filler for applications like road construction or concrete reinforcement – a significant step-down from the high-performance aerospace material it once was. Wevolver report notes that composites are frequently landfilled or incinerated precisely because they are intrinsically hard to recycle, and no economically viable alternative at an industrial scale currently exists.
The contrast with metal aircraft recycling is stark. Quest Metals points out that recycling aluminum consumes 90% less energy than producing it from raw materials – making it both environmentally and economically attractive. Carbon fiber offers no such return. The energy required to attempt a meaningful recovery of composite fibers is several times higher than for aluminum, and the output is typically a degraded material worth a fraction of the original. For the recycling industry, this means that the more composite material an aircraft contains, the less economically viable the entire teardown becomes.
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Airbus and Boeing Are Only Just Starting To Figure This Out
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It was only in late 2025 that Aviation Week Network reported Airbus had signed a contract with French startup Fairmat to explore how carbon fibers might be recovered from dismantled A350 airframes and potentially reused in aeronautical construction. The word “explore” is telling. This is not a recycling solution – it is an investigation into whether one might be possible.
Airbus is the manufacturer of one of the two most composite-intensive commercial jets ever built, and it was only recently at the stage of signing exploratory agreements with startups. As Simple Flying has previously reported, the fate of waste carbon fiber from aviation remains largely unresolved, with the industry still working through what viable end-of-life options might look like at any meaningful scale.
Boeing‘s position is similarly early. The company has acknowledged the composite recycling challenge and has worked with partners on limited research programs, but no industrial-scale solution for recovering and reusing carbon fiber from retired 787 airframes exists today. The MDPI research from the University of Porto puts the broader problem plainly: there is a clear discontinuity between the pace at which composite materials have been adopted in aviation and the pace at which end-of-life recycling for those materials has developed.
Can The Industry Solve This Before It Becomes A Crisis?
There are reasons for cautious optimism, but the timeline is tight. On the materials side, thermoplastic composites 00 a newer class of composite where the resin can be remelted when heated – offering a more recyclable alternative to the thermoset composites used in the A350 and 787. Aviation Week Network has reported that Boeing introduced thermoplastics into elementary structural parts of the 787’s fuselage and wing in 2018, and that industry use of thermoplastics is projected to grow significantly through the end of this decade. But thermoplastics remain a small fraction of what is currently flying, and the vast composite structures of the A350 and 787 already in service are thermoset, meaning the more recyclable material is a solution for future aircraft, not the ones retiring now.
For the jets already built, the more promising near-term path lies in advancing recycling processes themselves. Research from the University of Sydney, covered by ScienceDaily, has shown that a hybrid approach combining chemical pretreatment with thermal recycling can recover fibers that retain up to 90% of their original strength. The same research found that if advanced recycling methods were fully implemented across the industry, energy use in composite waste processing could be reduced by as much as 70%. The technical potential exists. What is missing is the industrial infrastructure and the economic incentive to deploy it at scale. As Airways Magazine notes, unlike the automotive industry, where EU directives have long governed end-of-life vehicle recycling, aviation has no equivalent unified regulatory framework for composite waste. That gap remains one of the biggest structural barriers to progress.
What the industry does next will matter enormously. As Simple Flying has reported, the question of what happens to waste carbon fiber from aviation is one the sector can no longer defer. The MDPI researchers at the University of Porto conclude that only a multi-stakeholder push – involving manufacturers, recyclers, regulators, and certification authorities working together – can close the gap between how composites are used and how they are disposed of. The A350 and 787 transformed what commercial aircraft could do. Whether the industry can now transform what happens to them at the end of their lives is the next test.
