People are now separating their rubbish more and more at home, so it’s strange to visit places where you lump everything together and stick it all into one bin.
McDonald’s rationale is that it’s difficult to recycle things when they have food residue on them. This doesn’t entirely stack up since other companies manage it, and there is plenty of rubbish that doesn’t have food on it. It would appear there is a reluctance to allocate the resource that would be needed to process it.
This is the situation with McDonald’s UK, but their counterparts in Germany and Sweden do manage to separate their rubbish, with the former saying they achieve a 90% recycling rate. In the UK they’ve instead been trialling a scheme in Sheffield since 2007 where waste from 11 restaurants is incinerated and turned into energy.
McDonald’s said in 2008 that they wanted to send zero waste to landfill by now, so I’ve written to them to see how they’re getting on with that.
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