Gen Phoenix, a textile manufacturing company based in Peterborough, England, published its CirculAir Playbook at the 2026 Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg.
The CirculAir Playbook is designed as a practical guide for the industry to facilitate circularity in the use of aircraft seat covers.
The Peterborough-based company takes waste from the leather industry, uses it, processes it into fibres and then generates seat cover material.
“If a seat cover is designed in a certain way, we can take the end-of-life seat cover, avoiding all disassembly techniques and complex kind of processes. We can put the entire finished cover into our process to regenerate and recycle it into a new material for the future,” said Matt Oakley, Product Management Director of Gen Phoenix.
The playbook outlines Gen Phoenix’s learnings from a collaborative project examining textile designs and material fatigue.
“Conventionally, seat covers are basically laminated, so kind of glued to a foam. The foam adds aesthetic improvements and it also adds comfort,” explained Oakley at the Hamburg Messe. “So what this requires is that the industry does things a little bit differently. So we can’t use conventional design methods to create these new covers.”
There are now 3D spacer fabrics made from polyester. Polyester can be turned back into fibres, and then the fibres can also then go through the regeneration process.
“In the playbook, we have a section around that you can actually gain more comfort from less material. So there’s actually a weight benefit to adopting spacer foam over conventional foam,” added Oakley.
Typically, airlines replace their seat covers every three to six years. They are replaced because it has been difficult to recycle them. It has not been cost-effective to disassemble the seat covers into their constituent parts and recycle them separately. Consequently, they go into landfill, creating a significant amount of waste each year.
“Once we get the first adopter, I can see this being a really pivotal change in the market,” said Oakley of the process outlined in the new CirculAir Playbook.