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."

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