Day 292 - 01 Nov 96 - Page 20
1
2 (Short Adjournment)
3
4 MR. MORRIS: I am going to move on to forests next. It is not
5 complete, I have not got all the best issues outlined here,
6 but may be if I move to forests. I did make some
7 calculations which I have not got in front of me, based on
8 Mr. Langet's estimate of 140 pounds waste. Now, if I can
9 just find it, to give a bit of context.
10
11 MR JUSTICE BELL: What was the 140 pounds waste.
12
13 MR. MORRIS: I think it was Robert Langet, page 4 of his first
14 statement, that the average McDonald's restaurant produces
15 about 140 pounds of packaging on premises waste per day.
16 Now, it was not clear to me, and I will have to check his
17 evidence, which I have not done yet, that that was all the
18 waste, or that was just the waste that remained in the
19 store, which seems likely. Therefore, as half the business
20 is carry-out -- well in America for certain -- that actual
21 amount would be greater. Of course, this is, anyway, from
22 three years back.
23
24 I have not got my calculations in front of me, but I did
25 make some calculation where we are talking of hundred of
26 thousands of tons of packaging waste per year. I might be
27 wrong there. I will get the calculations. It might be
28 hundreds of thousands of kilos. That was a bit of a
29 digression, I will have to get my figures clear before
30 I deal with that. The figure for Europe was actually 25
31 million kilos when we were going through Mr. Von Erp. So I
32 think I worked it out at something like half a million tons
33 worldwide of packaging waste a year, something like that.
34 I will come back to that.
35
36 All I want to say is, Mr. Oakley and Mr. Von Erp,
37 particularly, identified something like 70 percent or more
38 was paper - 76 percent of all packaging was paper product.
39 So we are talking about a staggering amount of paper being
40 used to produce McDonald's packaging. I am going to deal
41 with the matter of the area of forest it takes to keep
42 McDonald's supplied in paper, but not today, but my initial
43 calculations were that it would be over a thousand square
44 miles of forest needing to be available every year for
45 McDonald's paper sources.
46
47 And McDonald's recognise, in their own words, not only in
48 their own words, in their own public words, that paper
49 packaging is damaging to the environment. They do not say,
50 'Well, we use so little it does not really matter
51 whatsoever.' They go on the offensive in their Mcfact
52 cards of June 1990, which is tab 44 in Defendants list of
53 documents, bundle 2. "The packaging McDonald's use today
54 is the result of years of study. Up to the mid '70s
55 McDonald's used paper and paper packaging for all products
56 but because of serious concerns at that time" -- 'serious
57 concerns' we note -- "from the environmentalists about the
58 destruction of trees, water pollution and the high use of
59 energy involved in manufacturing paper we began to
60 re-evaluate our paper packaging choice."
