Day 008 - 07 Jul 94 - Page 32


     
     1        paragraph I would like you to look at:  "At the outset,
              EDF recognised McDonald's substantial existing initiatives
     2        in recycling, and McDonald's interests in going further."
 
     3        May I pause there, Mr. Langert, the task force was
              established, you told us I think, in late 1990, the fall
     4        of 1990; is that right?
              A.  Yes.
     5
         Q.   Is it right that there were existing initiatives in
     6        recycling at McDonald's?
              A.  Yes.
     7
         Q.   Is it right that they were substantial?
     8        A.  Yes.
 
     9   Q.   Can you briefly tell us what they were, out of your head?
              A.  Well, recycling -- I would define recycling as two
    10        separate activities.  One would be the actual recycling of
              products, and the other being the buying of recycled
    11        products.
 
    12        In the terms of recycling, I led an effort on behalf of
              McDonald's to expand both our corrugated recycling
    13        programme in our restaurant and the recycling of the post
              consumer polystyrene packaging that our customers were
    14        using.  That had started as a one store test in early
              1989.  Eventually, before we switched out of foam,
    15        eventually it had gone to 1,000 restaurants.
 
    16        In terms of the buy recycled, and back at that time in
              1989 we were purchasing fairly significant volumes of
    17        recycled paper and had a programme in place to purchase
              more.
    18
         Q.   Yes.  I would like to deal with the first of those topics
    19        first, if I may.  I will come back to the other ones
              recycled content later on.  How has it turned out, your
    20        recycling of used material programme?
              A.  The post customer packaging programme?
    21
         Q.   Yes, how has it turned out?
    22        A.  It did not turn out well.  I was involved in every
              aspect of that programme.  It had many difficulties to
    23        achieve success.  The first difficulty that we had was
              getting the consumers to do it right, to do the separation
    24        right at the store.
 
    25        We went through multiple educational materials to help our
              consumers immediately, we thought, fairly efficiently 
    26        figure out what goes in the environment/index.html">litter bin and what goes into 
              the recycle bin, but they both had difficulty figuring out 
    27        what the polystyrene foam was and also, in general, as a
              rule, did not separate the food, did not separate paper
    28        from food.
 
    29        So, in store we had problems with customer participation.
              There were also logistical problems along the whole row in
    30        terms of storage, transportation and collection.  One of
              the problems we had -- again, we are a food service

Prev Next Index