Golden Arches are getting a green overhaul
Eco-friendly concept restaurants launch soon in Ontario, B.C.
McDonald’s Canada is shaking up its packaging strategy almost a year after Greenpeace revealed the fast-food giant was one of the country’s top five plastic polluters in shoreline waste audits.
When diners head to the McDonald’s on Wonderland Road South in London, Ont., or the Vancouver spot on Hastings Street starting Aug. 19, they’ll notice several differences between those restaurants and the country’s 1,448 others. Wooden cutlery and stir sticks, as well as paper straws will appear at the two “green concept restaurants” as part of a pilot for thechain. The stores will also serve fully recyclable cups with new fibre lids that diners can sip from strawfree.
Across Canada, the company has already begun selling McWraps in thin paper wrapping instead of a thicker carton, ditching foam gravy bowls and breakfast platters, emblazoning Happy Meals with recycling instructions and serving coffee in “lightweighted” cups. All told, the moves will remove more than 1,500 tonnes of packaging materials from the McDonald’s Canada system annually. It’s part of a plan to ensure all of McDonald’s consumer packaging comes from renewable, recycled or certified sources by 2025.
Many have applauded the push. When a fast-food giant as ubiquitous as McDonald’s makes bold moves to increase sustainability, it’s bound to have an impact and persuade competitors to follow suit, they reason.
McDonald’s has spent the last few years renovating stores, introducing all-day breakfasts, announcing cage-free egg and deforestation-free pledges as well as discounted items, and it’s finally paying off. According to July’s second-quarter earnings report, global same-store sales expanded by 6.5 per cent, more than they have in seven years. Its stock hit an all-time high.
But the chain mainly sat back and watched while competitors sich as Harvey’s and Swiss Chalet, as well as A&W, got out ahead of the growing discontent over plastic by committing to scrap plastic straws last year. McDonald’s made the switch in the U.K. and Ireland and started testing options in the U.S., but left Canadians with plastic.
Rob Dick, a supply chain officer at McDonald’s Canada, had been hearing the calls for paper straws. His staff noticed they were being offered at other restaurants long before McDonald’s decided to pilot them in Canada.
“The infrastructure required to produce paper straws for a system that has 1,450 restaurants is much different from the infrastructure that’s required to produce paper straws for two restaurants,” he said.
“The packaging supply in particular for quick service restaurants has been built over the past 50 years. We’re going to try and change it in five or six and that’s not going to be easy.”
The company has said it’s implementing sustainability assessments on farms and is piloting sustainable beef certification in Canada, but greening its global supply chain has been a challenge.
McDonald’s soy feed for its chicken has been linked to Amazon rainforest deforestation. Last month, McDonald’s main chicken and beef supplier, Cargill, was named the “worst company in the world” by the environmental non-profit Mighty Earth because of ongoing deforestation issues related to animal feed in Brazil’s Cerrado region.
McDonald’s also plummeted from Tier 2 to Tier 3 on the 2018 Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare rankings, which measure 150 companies practices around the treatment of animals.