Questions answered
There are 3 questions about “Waste” in the “How do you operate?” topic.
Click on a question to read our answer.
- 1. how much waste does MacDonalds produce a day ?
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The waste generated by a McDonald’s restaurant will vary according to factors such as location, frequency of visitors, product mix, and percentage of eat-in and take away orders, and opening hours. For example, a drive thru can produce from 91 kg to 153 Kg a day while a high street restaurant can produce around 104 kg per day. It has been calculated by McDonald’s waste contractor that on average a McDonald’s restaurant produces 125 kg waste per day.
(December 2009)
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What are these? Delicious Digg Reddit Facebook StumbleUpon - 2. Each day, how many paper cups and paper bags are used by McDonald's in the US? How much waste does this produce (CO2, trees cut, landfills, etc.) and what are the environmental impacts of these paper cups and bags?
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Thank you for your question. Make Up Your Own Mind has been set up specifically to answer questions about McDonald's within the UK so it is hard for us to answer specific questions about other markets, although you can visit the home page of McDonald's US via www.mcdonalds.com.
With regards to McDonald’s UK McDonald's takes environmental responsibilities very seriously and is committed to reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill. This is achieved through recycling all its cardboard packaging and its used cooking oil for the production of 100% bio-diesel which is used to run its delivery fleet, re-using bun trays and shake containers, design improvements for packaging such as reducing plastic in salad containers and removing all foamed polystyrene. Unfortunately recycling customer waste is very difficult in the UK, as paper waste that has food residue is not accepted at recycling facilities, and nor are many types of plastic. So rather than send waste to landfill we work hard to 'recover' as much as possible. For example, waste from 11 McDonald's restaurants in Sheffield is currently being diverted from landfill and sent to an energy-from-waste facility. This project is proving so successful for food-contaminated waste that the company is now looking to expand this project to other parts of the country, where the facilities exist. Additionally, McDonald's has conducted a compost trial for 12 of its restaurants in Dorset and currently are awaiting results of the test.
(April 2009)
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What are these? Delicious Digg Reddit Facebook StumbleUpon - 3. why don't you give out food to homeless people instead of throwing it away? there's always lots of homeless people outside the mcdonalds in my town
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The simple answer is McDonald's produces very little edible wastage indeed, less than one percent. This is because each restaurant works to a system that calculates how many customers can be expected at any one time and therefore how much food to make. Because the food needs to be hot, the maximum period between cooking and serving is ten minutes which gives the restaurant time to adjust these calculations if necessary.
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