Green Options » McDonald's

Are Large, For-Profit Corporations Intrinsically Less Ethical?

Steve Savage — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:43:35 +0000

In the comment streams on my blog posts there is a recurrent theme from one segment of the respondents - they have a deep distrust in the large companies that are involved in modern agricultural technology. They don’t believe these companies will behave ethically because they are for profit entities “only answerable to their shareholders.”

I’d like to speak directly to this as a long-time Ag industry insider whose experience does not support these suspicions. I know that some will dismiss this perspective assuming I am biased, but one has to balance potential for bias with actually having first-hand experience from which to speak. Over the last 32 years I’ve work for or with most of the companies, large and small, that provide agricultural technologies. Fourteen of those years have been as an independent consultant so I get to know what is going on inside of many companies in a given year. I have still only had direct knowledge of a subset of what happens, but in all of that exposure I’ve never witnessed an unethical decision or action - not even the consideration of one. I’ve seen certain decisions that were short-sighted. I’ve sometimes seen decision-making processes that are more driven by fear than by opportunity. I’ve seen missed opportunities because vision was lacking. I’ve occasionally seen failures to take advantage of synergies that could have been realized between divisions of large organizations. I’ve seen problems, but I believe that some level of dysfunction is inevitable in any organization involving people. Still, unethical behavior isn’t something I’ve seen so I disagree that it is automatically likely just because of the characteristics of the company.

On balance I’ve also seen these organizations, large and small, frequently make important contributions to society in terms of the productivity and safety of our food supply. I’ve seen these companies continue to do that in an environment of constant activist attack and very limited public understanding because so few people farm.

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McDonald’s Explores Charging Station Options

Allison Boyer — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:39:17 +0000

According to reports, McDonald’s is beginning to explore electric car charging stations at their restaurants. Starting on July 14, one of their locations, in Cary, North Carolina, will give drivers the option to charge their cars as they eat.

Says Environmental Leader,

The charging stations feature:

Secure, authorized access to charging, which helps eliminate energy theft and cord theft.

Networked ability for drivers to find and navigate to open charging stations.

Control functions that allow utilities to optimize grid use.

You can read more here.

The EV Infrastructure chicken-and-egg problem: Resolution

Richard Lowenthal — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:11:49 +0000

Coulomb Technologies was founded in 2007 with the mission to ensure that anyone who is considering the choice to buy an electric vehicle will have adequate access to fuel for the cars.

In the US there are 247 million cars but only 53 million home garages, meaning that a lot of electric vehicles will need to be fueled outside the home garage. Exacerbating the situation, according to studies at UC Davis, 80% of owners of electric vehicles will want to charge more than once a day.

It comes to this: we need charging opportunities where our cars are parked when we sleep and when we work. Since Coulomb’s founding, much as been written regarding the “chicken and egg problem” with infrastructure and vehicles. Will people buy electric vehicles if they don’t have a place to charge them, and conversely, will anyone buy infrastructure if they don’t see cars?

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ZapRoot: Killing Bambi for Your Salad

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:57:35 +0000

This post contains additional media. Click here to view the full post.

From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.

Links for this week’s edition:

sustainablog - Killing for Crops
Gas 2.0 - Ecodriving with the AAM
EcoScraps - McDonalds Green Billboard
Shell and the Alberta Oil Sands
Sad Hippies

These progressive US cities and businesses are not alone in their desire to lay the infrastructure foundation. Already in the US, cities including San Jose, San Francisco, Walnut Creek, Las Vegas and Chicago have networked infrastructure in place.

In Europe some of the biggest deployments to date are now installed in the Czech Republic, Netherlands and Amsterdam. Other businesses too are installing charging stations in anticipation of coming electric vehicles.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company installed two charging stations for patrons and employees of the brewery with electric vehicles. Coulomb’s charging stations are an important part of Sierra Nevada’s sustainability initiatives that include solar, fuel cells, recycling, energy efficiency, water conservation and transportation improvements. Sierra Nevada was the first corporation to install the ChargePoint networked charging stations.

In this industry the recession helps. Tax credits and stimulus funding are providing funds to cities to pay for infrastructure. Additionally, cities, counties, and businesses are buying fleets of whatever car they can find. The time is right now, in part because of the recession, in part because every automaker has announced plans to manufacture electric vehicles.

Coulomb and our networked infrastructure have received broad support from leaders, policy makers and environmentalists. The rollout of electric vehicles in the next 18 months requires an open and ubiquitous charging infrastructure.

With progressive leadership from early-adopter municipalities, utilities, and businesses, infrastructure is in deployment now. Unlike the chicken and egg debate – there is a clear answer – infrastructure is taking shape worldwide, even though very few vehicles are shipping today. Progressive organizations are putting out the welcome mat for electric vehicles.

More on Coulomb Technologies:

Coulomb Technologies was founded in 2007 with the mission to ensure that anyone who is considering the choice to buy an electric vehicle will have adequate access to fuel for the cars. Visit www.coulombtech.com to learn more about Coulomb’s infrastructure plans and where you can find a local charging station. Follow Coulomb on Twitter @coulombevi

Three Steps to be Food Smart when the Media Mystifies

Lisa Kivirist — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:41:01 +0000

There’s a missing ingredient in our diet today that’s imperative to our nation’s health. You can’t add it to your grocery list, forage it at the local farmers’ market or plant it in your garden. It’s media literacy — the ability to critically question the hidden agendas in our “media diets” and evaluate the manipulating media messages we’re bombarded with daily .

Have no fear, Melinda Hemmelgarn is here. A national public health advocate, registered dietitian and award-winning “Food Sleuth” columnist, Hemmelgarn is the cape crusader for helping us, particularly if we have children, develop the savvy-thinking skills to objectively understand the media and thereby support a truly healthy food system. “After decades of working in the nutrition field, I grew convinced that the ‘eat healthy’ messages from the public health community simply weren’t working,” explains Hemmelgarn. “People aren’t changing their eating habits and a key reason why is that we are constantly bombarded with media messages promoting unhealthy food choices. When Pepsi has an annual advertising budget of $1.3 billion, their messages dilute the National Cancer Institute’s “eat more fruits and vegetables” messages, promoted with a budget of less than $5 million.”

Knowing that healthy food message couldn’t compete on advertising dollars, Hemmelgarn instead chose to help teach people how to navigate the message minefield of today’s vast media empire.

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Live Greenwashing about Healthy Food: McDonald’s Lettuce Growing Billboard

Jennifer Lance — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:48:01 +0000

A 2007 McDonald’s billboard near Chicago featured growing lettuce plants stating, “Fresh salads”. Considering the short life span of such a billboard, McDonald’s reputation for rainforest destruction, and the fact their salads are not organic, fresh (they are prepackaged), or healthy, I can’t embrace this campaign. Still, using plants for advertising is definitely a unique idea. You can watch the billboard grow in this video.

Via: AzSustainability.com

“Clowning” with Six Degrees of Food News

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:12:48 +0000

Editor’s note: What does the opening of a McDonald’s in Beijing have to rising food prices in the US, or food riots in other parts of the developing world? Plenty, according to Jen Humphrey, a student in Professor Simran Sethi’s Media and the Environment course at the University of Kansas. This post was originally published to the course blog on Tuesday, March 11, 2008.

Anyone else find this photo creepy?

Something about the sunglasses, I guess. Or the export of American culture.

The photo depicts clowns who were on hand to celebrate the opening of a McDonald’s in Beijing, and it was part of a New York Times article about the company’s record profits in February. McDonald’s profits jumped 11.7 percent internationally, fueled in part by Leap Year sales but also the weak U.S. dollar. You can get more Mac for your Yuan these days.

I’d like to use that story to play the Six Degrees of Separation game. But instead of people, in this instance, I’d like to look at the short distance between food news. We know McDonald’s is doing well – that’s one data point. Let’s put another marker by the story that University of Washington researchers determined that calorie for calorie, junk food is way cheaper than good-for-you food. According to the researchers, who compared foods in major grocery stores in the Seattle area, you pay $1.76 per 1,000 calories for sugary, fatty foods that have the most calories, but you pay $18.16 per 1,000 calories for the lowest-calorie foods (which are most often better for you, such as fruits and vegetables).

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McDonald’s Makes its Own Biodiesel: McGreenwashing or the McFuture?

Robin Schidlowski — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:01:15 +0000

Image credit Scotch Print DeustchlandMcDonald's, United Kingdom announced last week that it will begin producing biodiesel from its own used vegetable oil, to power its fleet of 150 freight trucks. While the idea of McDonald's being green is in some respects preposterous, the move is, at the very least, noteworthy.

Clearly, McDonald's is nowhere near being a “sustainable” business, and the idea of it being so is impossible. Some say all things sustainable are also inherently local and Mickey D's is as far from local as one can get, super-transnational. Their end products are all highly processed, their animals are raised in unspeakable conditions, and the nutritional value of their “food” is negligent.

This is just the beginning of a long list of what is wrong with McDonald's and it's too easy to come up with more. But is McDonald's all bad? Is Ronald's influence great enough to make smart business moves, like producing fuel from industry waste, common practice? It might be.

The future of corporations lies with the individuals who run them. As our collective awareness about environmental degradation from industry intensifies, we can expect more business people to make responsible decisions on behalf of corporations.

Of course it is important not to be satisfied with simple answers. As good as making biofuel from waste oil might sound, it doesn't address the fundamental underlying issue, such as, whether trucking fast food cross country is a sustainable way of nourishing ourselves. Whether this scale of production can be healthy for people, animals, or the environment, regardless of how the shipping fuel is made, is questionable.

The benefit of McDonald's move is that it creates an opening for green issues and technology to address the audience that still patronizes McDonald's and drives SUV's. If we want radical ideas to really be mainstream we have to enter the discussion at a level where we will be heard. Ronald McDonald can do that.