Day 293 - 04 Nov 96 - Page 16
1 England?
2
3 MR. MORRIS: You may have done.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That is in the left-hand margin, beneath the
6 picture.
7
8 MR. MORRIS: Right. I notice it says.... Well, I mean, our
9 point would be the point that McDonald's recognise that it
10 should be done, it could be done and we are saying that it
11 is not being done. That is basically the long and short of
12 it.
13
14 They were doing recycling in a substantial number of stores
15 at one point, but it was down to 10 stores out of 10,000 by
16 the time Robert Beavers gave evidence for the second time,
17 I think, or it was Mr. Langert who said that only 10 stores
18 were now doing it.
19
20 Then that report ends up on page 2, the very last sentence
21 of that large typeface: And we are firmly committed to
22 recycling at every opportunity. So, this is part of the
23 impression that is being given publicly.
24
25 If you look on the far right box on that page, they have
26 actually talked about there were some benches made out of
27 recycled McDonald's coffee cups, so it is clear that they
28 were actually able to do recycling.
29
30 That is basically it. I wanted to refer to those two
31 pages.
32
33 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, thank you.
34
35 MR. MORRIS: Now, again, I might be a little bit dodging about
36 all over the place here, but I wanted to refer to just a
37 few things in Robert Langert's statement.
38
39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Right.
40
41 MR. MORRIS: Who joined McDonald's in 1991. Just very briefly
42 in paragraph 5, he said that McDonald's approach to its
43 packaging, recycling and waste has evolved over a number of
44 years as a response to changing environmental concerns.
45 Again this is part of our argument. Then he goes on about
46 the serious concern from environmentalists in the 1970s
47 about the destruction of trees, water pollution and the
48 high use of energy involved in manufacturing paper. That
49 is all in paragraph 5. We have heard about all that.
50
51 Now, paragraph 9 is where he said that the average
52 McDonald's restaurant produces about 140 pounds of
53 packaging on premises waste per day. Now, I could not get
54 to the bottom of whether this was the calculation from the
55 waste product that was left in the store and therefore did
56 not include any of the take-away packaging or not. I did
57 not have time to check all that. But we are talking about
58 140 pounds minimum waste, possibly double that if you
59 include take-away that is not considered.
60
