Airport expansion goes green – literally

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport

As part of its expansion programme, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is utilising construction materials made from grass.

Within the scope of the work will be the construction of a new pier and terminal, which will include operational and commercial spaces.

Many of these spaces will include ceilings, walls, furniture and flooring built using panels made from compressed grass cuttings from the airport itself.

The company producing the panels is ECOR, which has been tasked with providing some 100,000m² of them each year.

Promoting sustainable construction, the company has stated that the grass, cut from the 10km² of grassland around Schiphol’s runways, will be cleaned and pressed without the use of chemicals. In this way, with the grass maintaining its solid form, the CO2 stored within it will remain captured.

The airport, which has been developing its plan with ECOR for some years, has stated that the panels are “certified, fire-resistant and have the same level of quality as the well-known MDF panels”.

The panels will initially be produced at ECOR’s manufacturing facility in Venlo in the Netherlands, but the airport said it hopes to relocate production to a site “at or near Schiphol” in the future.