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McDonalds, like Wal Mart is often scapegoated into a corner as an uncaring behemoth. I’m not going to debate that because what’s more important is the scale of change that such a large company can produce. Anyway, McDonalds has an interesting and quite transparent “corporate social responsibility” blog which is actually worth reading and participating on. Recently they ran a little piece on packaging which lays out McDonald’s environmental policies in that regard. They’ve come a long way from the days of styrofoam and point out the following recent accomplishments:
- Napkins are smaller and contain recycled content.
- Happy Meal boxes are made partly from recycled newspapers.
- Our trayliners have recycled newspaper content too.
- We’ve trimmed the amount of material used in our French fry and McNugget cartons.
- Our straws use less material.
So is McDonald’s doing enough? When you’re as big as they are, you’re bound to be held to a higher standard and I’d like to see a whole lot more post-consumer material. In fact I’d like to see the word “recycled” eliminated unless it specifically refers to post-consumer content. There are not a great many specifics on the current blog post, such as just “how much” recycled content there is in the packaging either.
One of the great ironies about this is the fact that most people who care about McDonald’s packaging are unlikely to eat there anyway. Perhaps I’m making a snooty demographic judgement here, but McDonald’s has to take into consideration that the extra costs involved with improved packaging may not be appreciated by much of their regular clientele who don’t know enough to notice. Rather, the payoff comes in terms of less hassle from environmentalists and, hopefully, some personal satisfactoin.
How would you advise them?
