Cleaner Air For Fat People
July 2nd, 2007 | Posted in Energy, Environment, Recycling, Responsibility, Technology, Transportation
I apologize for the extended hiatus, but between my laziness and traveling, opining (online) has been difficult. I did come across a story today that made me chuckle though. Apparently, McDonald’s is going to start using its own cooking oil to power its delivery fleet in England. Not very much information can be found in this cryptically titled article, “McDonald’s to recycle cooking oil for fuel“, but I’m sure more information is available on the web. The gist is this:
- The fast food chain aims to switch all its 155 vehicles to run on biodiesel in the next 12 months
- The biodiesel will be made up of 85 percent used cooking oil collected from around 900 McDonald’s restaurants and 15 percent from pure rapeseed oil
- By using the fuel, McDonald’s will save 1,675 tonnes of carbon per year
Honestly, that’s all the article tells you so you don’t need to click on the link.
To be sure, this is great news. I hope this is pilot program and that Ronald will mandate a similar program in the Americas. I’m also certain that McDonald’s isn’t doing this just for environmental reasons. The size of the recycling effort will probably translate to measurable cost savings, something that may not quite be possible in the United States due to relatively low fuel costs.
I often wish the government would ban establishments like McDonald’s but I can’t come ever come to rationally support the argument. People are free to gorge on shitty meat, “raised” in developing South American countries at the expense of millions of acres of trees. The emotional irony I’m presented with is that while I disdain businesses like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, their ubiquity makes them powerful actors, if and when they choose to behave like upstanding corporate citizens, and I silently champion that. So, for now, while the obese waddle through the aisles of megacenters muting their insatiable appetite for lipids, at least they’ll do so while being a little greener. The disappointment lies in the fact that it is those to propagate deforestation, obesity, the death of small business and like who are cleaning up their act and not those who suffer from it.
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