Bristol Airport Sustainability

Each year, over ten million passengers pass through Bristol Airport – a number that’s set to rise. To meet demand, the airport is expanding, with sustainability at the heart of its plans. Building on a longstanding commitment, Bristol Airport is on track to achieve net zero operations by 2030, but much of its progress - solar panels, electric ground vehicles, waste reduction initiatives - happens behind the scenes, meaning passengers aren’t seeing the full picture.

Our brief was to transform their corporate sustainability strategy into an eye-catching, digestible campaign that educates passengers on Bristol Airport’s environmental commitments. The challenges were to avoid being seen as greenwashing, cutting through the sensory overload of a stressful travel experience, and ensuring every message was rooted in reality, not empty promises.

We started with an insight: sustainability is jargon heavy. Terms like decarbonisation, and carbon offsetting are widely heard but poorly understood. To cut through, we needed to make sustainability feel tangible, real and relevant to passengers. Our approach was to strip out the buzzwords and predictable visual metaphors and bring aviation’s spirit of innovation to the challenge of our time.

Our team walked the entire passenger journey, from arriving at the car park right through to standing at the gate, mapping every potential touchpoint and its proximity to a sustainability initiative. This allowed us to build a real-world journey map, ensuring sustainability was visible at every step.

We then crafted messages and developed creative to bring these efforts to life. A message on the glass at the gate told passengers that the ground vehicles they could see were electric. On the back of airport buses, we highlighted the switch from diesel to hydronated vegetable oil. Along walkways, with flyers on their way to distant lands, a single message connected the moment: “We're on our way to net zero."

The campaign spanned the entire airport ecosystem: social media, parking areas, digital departure boards, even bathroom mirrors. Each touchpoint delivered just one simple, high-impact message. Together, they built a cumulative story of Bristol Airport’s sustainability efforts, meeting passengers at the right moment, in the right place, with the right message.

Rather than forcing complex information into an already overstimulating environment, we made sustainability easy to absorb. No greenwashing. No cognitive overload. Just real, visible impact - turning sustainability from a corporate promise into something passengers can see, understand and support.