While making it easy for customers to sort and recycle their meal packaging in our restaurants, we’re also going behind the scenes in our kitchens and supply chain. We’re working with suppliers to reduce, reuse and recycle in farms and factories, across our value chain.
The UN estimates that every year, a third of all food produced is either discarded, by consumers or retailers, or spoiled due to poor handling. If food loss and waste were its own country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter. This is an important issue for our customers, our communities and our business.
It’s simply not right that good food and precious resources go to waste, and we want to use our scale to help tackle the issue.
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Our work shows that each form of waste involves its own issues and has its own unique solutions, so we believe our most effective role is to build momentum around different aspects of packaging, food waste and recycling through a variety of actions and more targeted goals, including customer-facing initiatives, community programs and working with our suppliers. We recently announced the latest step in this ongoing journey: our 2025 goals to improve our packaging and reduce lobby waste.
Our efforts to eliminate waste in our kitchens and supply chain support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a global agenda to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all, specifically:
As well as these, we’ve mapped our Scale for Good initiatives to all 17 goals.
We want to ensure that our food serves its purpose of feeding people. In several countries, we’ve started working with our suppliers to reduce food loss and waste in our supply chains and with our Franchisees to reduce food going to waste in restaurants, but recognize that there is a lot more to be done.
In the U.S., the McDonald’s Food Donation Program in partnership with Food Donation Connection has 785 registered restaurants and has donated over 370,000 pounds of food to charities in need, as of January 2018.
To begin scaling some of these initiatives, we are working on a Global Food Disposition Policy, which will encourage our suppliers and distributors globally to dispose of food in alignment with the food waste hierarchy, including enabling food donations to be made where possible.
(Adapted from EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy)
Around the world, our restaurants recycle kitchen waste materials, such as cooking oils, polyethylene foils, and corrugate or cardboard used in packaging, all of which can be turned into useful new resources. In Europe, countries have regularly reviewed roadmaps to minimize waste, with annual tracking to monitor progress. At the end of 2016, an average of 29% of total waste by weight from restaurants in 12 countries was being recycled.
Our long-term objective is to eliminate food and packaging waste to landfill. Our logistics providers can play a key role by collecting and backhauling the waste when they drop off the supplies at the restaurants. This not only helps recycle material from restaurants in remote locations but it also reduces road mileage because a waste company doesn’t have to collect.
In the U.K., our logistics partner’s fleet runs on biodiesel; around 40% of which is from our used cooking oil. That’s a saving of over 6,500 metric tons of GHG emissions.
In the U.K., food waste from kitchens is taken to an anaerobic digestion plant which makes renewable energy. Microorganisms break down the food, turning it into bio-fertilizer for farmers, and biogas for the national grid and dairy businesses, where heat is used to pasteurize the milk and power the packing lines. Fresh organic milk is then transported to McDonald’s restaurants across the U.K. – the full circle!
In Australia, we’re working with logistics partner Martin Brower Australia to support Foodbank, a nonprofit organization that provides food to charities and community groups. The partnership has resulted in regular donations of surplus food to Foodbank’s recipients, avoiding it being sent to landfill.
Our new packaging goals reflect insights from the last several years of our recycling journey and our commitment to using our scale for good.
Learn MoreSee how we’re using our scale as one of the world’s largest restaurant companies to make a real difference.
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