Day 292 - 01 Nov 96 - Page 49
1 On page 43, I referred to the EDF report, which basically
2 said that foam was worse in every way than paper, which we
3 have already demonstrated that. McDonald's were aware of
4 the damaging effects of paper packaging and so the EDF
5 report says basically that foam is worse in every way,
6 including 400 percent more waste by volume compared to
7 paper. I was going to quote that section, but it can be
8 read. That is line 48 onwards.
9
10 Page 54, paper bags. Less than 50 percent recycled, by
11 McDonald's terminology, before June 1990. Now, there was a
12 whole run through here of percentages of recycled contents
13 without indicating post-consumer and post-industrial
14 content. The paper bags contents seemed to be the one that
15 they always referred to as an example of how they have had
16 longstanding recycled packaging, but the content seemed to
17 have been somewhere around 25, 30 percent before June 1990,
18 or something.
19
20 So may be it would be worth reading pages 54 to the rest of
21 that day, really, because the note in square brackets,
22 where I have just finished, says CVE, that is Mr. Erp, on
23 day 62, line 38 said that the rest of Europe had nought
24 percent recycled content in their paper bags until February
25 1992, which rather gives a better picture of the reality of
26 the recycled content when we look at the European-----
27
28 MR JUSTICE BELL: Day 62, page 38.
29
30 MR. MORRIS: Page 38, line 2. Then we have page 56. There was
31 an argument about whether the bags are now hundred percent
32 or eighty percent. There was a lot of toing and froing
33 about that. Mr. Van Erp came in to say it was somewhere
34 between the two, or something.
35
36 Page 61 is the two and four hole trays, which seemed to be
37 the only item in the early 80s made substantially of
38 recycled paper. Obviously, we would say in any event they
39 are a completely superfluous item of packaging which are
40 not used in Europe, and there was some evidence on that.
41
42 So their recycled content would be immaterial. The point
43 is, every gram of virgin fibre in them would be completely
44 wasteful, even in McDonald's own terms, because nowhere
45 else in Europe were they using these carry out trays.
46
47 They also said on day 61, that is the note in brackets at
48 the end of that point, day 61, line 22, page 22, line 57,
49 that it was a suppliers' initiative to have recycled
50 content in these two and four hole trays which anyway only
51 are the kind of cardboardy things, it was not even
52 McDonald's initiative.
53
54 The next point on page 61 is all about the paper bag
55 content. The note underneath it is, 'originally nought
56 percent and 10, 25 percent in the late '70s, early '80s'.
57 Day 61, page 24.
58
59 On page 64 he made the point that the only unbleached
60 packaging they had was the paper bags with two and four
