Day 292 - 01 Nov 96 - Page 18
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
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4 MR. MORRIS: Mr. Oakley admitted that when the UK McDonald's
5 introduced CFCs in their packaging in 1986 as blowing
6 agents they were aware of ozone damage caused by CFCs in
7 aerosols but was not aware that they could apply to
8 packaging. But, as we revealed, in 1987 Friends of the
9 Earth called for a boycott of McDonald's products over
10 CFCs, and the next year McDonald's in the UK abandoned the
11 use of CFCs, although Mr. Oakley denied it was any
12 consideration but quite remarkably he said he had only
13 heard about the CFC problem from reading the newspapers,
14 The Sunday times.
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16 It seemed to very much rely on the chance reading of one
17 person, Mr. Oakley, at that stage, and I think that is
18 significant in terms of whether McDonald's had any
19 environmental considerations if they are relying on
20 Mr. Oakley reading something in a newspaper and making an
21 executive decision. It seems a bit more likely even that
22 the Friends of the Earth boycott, which he said had not
23 been a consideration, but as we come to his evidence we
24 will hear that McDonald's spokespeople had commented to the
25 press about the Friends of the Earth boycott call, they did
26 know about it,, and also in the USA, as a result of the
27 abandonment after protests in the USA of their Polystyrene
28 packaging, that-----
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30 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Can you remember what that happened?
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32 MR. MORRIS: Well, I am going to move on to that. I have not
33 got the date. I am going to go through that over the
34 weekend. I have the UK situation and the Europe situation
35 fairly well mapped out.
36
37 But McDonald's in the UK had announced that they would be
38 phasing out their Polystyrene packaging as a result of what
39 they were doing in the US, which they did not do in the
40 end. Meanwhile, in the USA our witness Brian Lippsett, who
41 is an expert researcher on packaging materials, had been
42 the researcher behind the campaign which forced the
43 withdrawal of McDonald's Polystyrene foam food packaging in
44 the USA. He identified the problems associated with
45 Styro-foam, toxic waste, damage to the ozone layer and smog
46 pollution, and also the leaking of Styrene from the packing
47 into the foods packaged in the foam, which comes under the
48 evidence of Dr. Millstone and Ronald Walker, and serious
49 disposal problems, the sheer volume of the material and the
50 lack of a suitable method of disposal.
51
52 Of course, the point about Polystyrene foam is the volume.
53 I think we had a figure somewhere, four times the volume
54 per item ending up in a landfill for equivalent, what they
55 now have in the US, the paper wrap. Of course, if they
56 used packaging and it was biodegradable it would not take
57 up probably even a tenth of the area. So the use of
58 Polystyrene foam is particularly bad in terms of landfill,
59 not just by weight but by volume.
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