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
