United Airlines is aiming to have electric aircraft flying regional routes by the end of the decade, part of the company’s goal to fully reduce its carbon footprint to net zero by 2050.

Those battery-powered aircraft are being developed by Swedish start-up Heart Aerospace, from which United Airlines placed an order for 100 planes in July 2021. United Airlines has pushed heavily into a variety of lower-emission forms of aviation, not only announcing plans to buy electric air taxis and vertical aircraft, as well as hydrogen-electric engines but also investing in the companies behind the advanced technologies.

“We cannot continue doing and operating our business the way we do; it is important that we change it, and the way we’ re going to change it is through investing in technology,” Mike Leskinen, United Airlines Ventures president, said in an interview as part of CNBC’s ESG Impact virtual conference on Thursday. “Existing technology is going to either cause us to fly less, which is an unacceptable alternative, or continue with a carbon footprint, which we believe is equally unacceptable,” Leskinen said.

Heart Aerospace, which recently redesigned what will be its first electric aircraft which is now called the ES-30, plans to have the planes enter service in 2028, said Anders Forslund, the company’s CEO and founder.

The 30-passenger planes will be driven by electric motors with battery-derived energy, allowing the planes to have a fully electric range of 200 kilometers. The planes will also include a reserve- hybrid engine powered by sustainable aviation fuel, allowing it to have an extended range of up to 400 kilometers with a full flight.

United Airlines could potentially offer those shorter routes not only with greater frequency but at a lower cost. Leskinen said. “As we adopt electric aircraft, I think the cost for a 30-seat aircraft or a 50-seat aircraft, as the industry evolves, is going to be lower than a traditional aircraft,” he said. For small cities, this means they are “going to get either service that they didn’t have before or greater frequency of service,” he added.

We're often told the importance of protecting the earth for future generations and children at St Oswald's CE Primary School certainly agree.

Nine-year old Isobel Kelleher from the school's Hummingbirds class thinks adults need to pay attention. “Sometimes they can be busy and I don't think they believe they can make a difference, but if everyone does a little bit, it all adds up.” she tells HuffPost UK. “We started looking at plastic pollution in our oceans and the things like plastic bags that are polluting them,” she says. “Fish can eat the plastic and they can die, or we might even eat the fish ourselves.”

Mr. Timms, Isobel's teacher, has been leading a new project at the school which encourages children to creatively raise the awareness of the need to be more environmentally-friendly. The entire Hummingbirds class, which is made up of nine-year-old and ten-year-old pupils, has been busy writing poems and creating online videos to warn adults about the serious situation of our oceans and wildlife.

Mr. Timms thinks children play an important role in teaching us how to take care of the things around us. "We sometimes don't know how much we can really learn from children." he says. "It is really a pleasant surprise to see parents come in and say that their children have been asking them to stop using plastic and to recycle more, and even stopping them from using plastic straws.”

Mr. Timms is proud of his Hummingbirds class. “The message that they would like to send to the world is simple: stopping this isn't someone else's job, and it won't be OK if we just leave it.”

Whether due to genuine concern for the environment or the widespread criticism of plastic among consumers, many companies have invested heavily in reducing their use of plastic packaging, which may indeed have a positive environmental impact. But another trend that’s grown out of the anti-plastic movement is a lot less positive: overpackaging. More and more brands have begun adding unnecessary paper packaging on top of plastic packaging in order to make their products look more environmentally friendly, without actually reducing plastic waste.

Unfortunately, there’s a very good reason companies are adopting this clearly problematic approach. Through a series of eight studies with more than 4,000 participants, we found that consumers will accept a product’s packaging as more environmentally friendly if it’s plastic with an additional layer of paper than if the product is visibly packaged in identical plastic packaging but without the paper. These perceptions (认知) in turn make consumers both more likely to buy a product, and willing to pay more for it.

Part of what makes this overpackaging trend particularly harmful is that it is much valued by consumers who reported engaging in more eco-friendly behaviors. They were more likely to view overpackaged products as environmentally friendly. As a result, the very consumers who are most interested in pushing companies to make sustainable choices are likely unintentionally encouraging the environmentally harmful practice of overpackaging.

The good news is, overpackaging isn’t the only way to signal sustainability and attract such consumers. In our studies, we found that instead of additional paper packaging, simply adding a minimal packaging sticker to plastic packaging could clarify the misperception that overpackaged products are more sustainable, Especially for products for which plastic is necessary to ensure safe transportation and lengthen shelf life, this kind of clear messaging can help reduce consumers, discrimination against the responsible use of plastic packaging.

Of course, minimal packaging stickers certainly should only be used if a brand has actually ensured that it is using the minimal possible packaging, ideally under the supervision of a trade organization or regulatory body that maintains clear, consistent standards.