McDonald’s recycling programs reuse an astounding amount of waste, but is the company doing enough?
In late 1989, McDonald’s made a splash in the media by announcing a plastics recycling program of unprecedented scale for a corporation of its size. The company’s commitment to begin recycling polystyrene containers (those hamburger “clamshells” many of us remember from our childhood, which the company stopped using all together not long after the announcement) and other products was hailed as the largest, most ambitious effort ever undertaken by a major corporation to recycle plastic refuse. Several months later, in April 1990, the company announced its plan to spend upwards of $100 million each year on recycled construction materials for the construction and remodeling of its restaurants. Together, many environmentalists saw the plans as a huge step in the right direction for corporate environmental responsibility in America.
Twenty years later, plenty has changed both for McDonald’s and the corporate recycling landscape as a whole. In today’s post-An Inconvenient Truth world, environmental awareness is more widespread, and corporations are held to a higher level of accountability for their actions — or inactions, as the case may be. So, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what McDonald’s recycling program looks like today, according to the company’s 2009 corporate responsibility report:
- The company’s first priority is to reduce the volume of materials and resources used through efficient packaging and design; its second priority is to recycle materials to the extent that infrastructure allows; and its third priority is to dispose of any non-recyclables appropriately.
- The average U.S. McDonald’s restaurant recycles over 17 tons of corrugated cardboard and approximately 13,000 pounds of used cooking oil annually.
- In Europe, more than 80% of used oil is converted into biodiesel, while about 30% of the fuel used in the company’s European logistics trucks comes from biodiesel.
- Many McDonald’s restaurants around the world — in Europe, Brazil, Canada, Japan and elsewhere — offer customer-focused recycling options, and recycling rates have generally been high. In Germany, for example, the recycling rate is 90%.
There is no doubt that these facts were selected to paint McDonald’s in as positive a light as possible. But, they are impressive numbers — even those of us who may be skeptical about the motives of giant corporations have to admit that. Could McDonald’s be doing more to help the planet? Is their recycling program a case of “greenwashing”? Do they actually care about the environment, or are they just doing this stuff because of public pressure? Who knows… But, I can say this: Whatever the company is doing is a lot better than doing nothing at all. And, when we’re talking about a multinational corporation the size of McDonald’s, “nothing at all” is not something the planet can afford.
Michael King
May 18th, 2010
I have worked in the Facilities Management field in the United Kingdom for many years particularly in shopping centres. A small centre in a university town in the North of England (35 retailers) has a very busy McDonalds. I was concerned that the recycling levels were not very good at the centre and instituted an on site waste segregation system. This involved staff physically opening every waste bag produced by the retailers. Within a very few days it became glaringly obvious that the McDonalds restaurant was responsible for half of the total annual waste produced by the centre as a whole. In other words, of the 380 tons of waste produced by the centre annually, 190 tons was produced by McDonalds. Prior to the on site segregation process starting all the McDonalds waste was thrown in a compactor and taken off to landfill. Within a month of the new system starting we were recycling over 90% of the waste from the centre as a whole, and virtually all of the waste from McDonalds.
We hear much of McDonalds saying they cannot recycle because of the contamination issue. The point about the on-site segregation process is that the cardboard burger and fries containers contained very, very small quantities of food waste and because we were sorting the cardboard before the food waste had the opportunity to degrade the recyclable card, the containers did not become contaminated. All the cardboard drinks containers were drained of any liquids and they too were recycled. All the pastic lids and straws were separated out and sent for plastic recycling. We even rescued all the soiled paper knapkins and brown paper bags and sent those for low level paper recycling.
The on-site segregation process results exceeded all my wildest expectations. The amount of waste going to landfill dropped to below 5% of the total waste at the site. Even more satisfyingly we were able to offer a full time job to a person who was about to be made redundant and create two other part time posts that would not otherwise have existed.
Some will undoubtedly ask “What about the costs?”. We had hoped to be able to deal with the waste at a lesser cost than previously, when virtually everything was sent to landfill. But that proved not possible. However, we were able to contain the operating costs to the same level as prior to the segregation process starting. Put against the outstanding success of the process in terms of the sustainability we could not have wished for more. But much more obvious was the fact that we were now sending virtually nothing to landfill.
What would have made life a lot easier would have been the introduction in to the McDonalds restaurant of three waste bins: one for cardboard, one for the lids and straws and one for the paper bags and knapkins. But we had no luck there. It would also have been of considerable help to have had a contribution from the McDonalds towards the increased labour costs. Who knows, someday that might happen.
In conclusion, I have absolutely no doubt that McDonalds in the UK could, and should, as a matter of urgency, competely re-think their whole approach to sustainability. Currently, they will only do that which they are obliged to do by the local legislature in which they operate. If they wanted to, McDonalds could recycle virtually everything that goes through their restaurants and make a huge contribution to the welfare of the planet. If they can do it in Germany they can do it everywhere else.
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