The aviation industry produces 868 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide every year, making it one of the highest-polluting industries on the planet. And while enthusiasm for sustainability is high, making air travel zero-carbon is a complex challenge, especially as passenger demand only continues to increase.
While sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production scales, aviation must find other ways of limiting emissions as much as possible. Data is key to this endeavour, as it is only through reliably identifying emission sources that strategies can be developed to tackle them.
This is the mission of Estuaire, a Paris-based startup co-founded by CEO Maxime Meijers. For his innovative work in the field, Meijers was honoured as our Top Innovator at the Aerospace Tech Review Awards 2025. His passion for aviation emerged in his hometown in Toulouse, France’s aviation hub. But after spells at leading aerospace companies, including Airbus, Meijers decided he wanted to build his own business that could more proactively address aviation’s sustainability challenge.
He explains:
Estuaire has two product lines. The first is a data platform where we measure flight-by-flight their climate impact. So we ingest everything, trajectory, weather, aircraft type. Bsically, if you’ve flown a flight we can tell you precisely what this aircraft released in carbon and the associated impact on the environment.
The other side of the business looks at solutions for mitigating climate impact. Meijers’ special passion is reducing contrails: Estuaire estimate that contrails are responsible for over 150Mt of industry emissions.
Meijers and his team have developed a comprehensive index for measuring contrails in real-time, a product they are currently trialling with several airlines. According to their analysis, 2.9% of world flights generated 80% of the total radiative forcing effect of contrails. Rerouting a very small number of flights could therefore have a substantial impact on the climate.
End-to-end contrail management methodology by Estuaire.
Meijers wants to see greater regulation in this area to force further change:
The challenge is that there’s no financial incentives or penalties that push airlines to work on contrails. That’s really something we want to set in place.
Aside from encouraging the EU to act on contrails, Meijers’ ambition is to grow his team and expand their work on emissions monitoring and reduction. On being honoured as Top Innovator, Meijers said:
It’s an award I pass to the team, notably our tech team, because they’re doing the ground work and the quality of our data should speak for itself. So it goes to them first, and having these industry recognitions just encourages us to go further.
🎥 Watch the full interview to hear more about Maxime Meijers’ vision for Estuaire and emissions monitoring in aviation.
Questions asked include:
- Where did your passion for sustainable aviation come from? What was the inspiration behind Estuaire?
- What industry challenges does Estuaire seek to address through its business?
- Which initiatives that you or the company have led that you are most proud of?
- How are you looking to grow in the future? What would you like to do next?
- What is the biggest challenge aviation faces in becoming a sustainable, zero-carbon industry? What advice would you give to help tackle it?
If your business would like to be considered for an Aerospace Tech Review Award, join us at Aerospace Tech Week 2026.
To hear from our other ATR Award winners, see:
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