Mcdonalds Environmental Saving Capacity

In the modern era, environmental strategies are often at the forefront of many international corporations.   The 2010 Munich Beer Fest allowed a chance encounter with an American McDonald's corporate employee who was making a convenient detour on his way to attending a seminar in Hamburg.   This seminar was a meeting between promoters and researches of a relatively new McDonald’s energy efficiency development campaign, and respective European managers and Franchise owners all there to discuss the reduction in energy consumption in their kitchens.   This then lead to a question of what has one of the worlds most iconic companies in the last 30 years done, or is doing, to improve their environmental friendliness, how such programmes can positively effect end results and what potentials lie   in actually making a significant difference to our environment.

McDonald’s restaurants environmental impact

McDonald's Corporation, both directly and indirectly, stamps an impressive Carbon footprint on this planet.   Exact publicly available figures on how much energy their restaurants alone consume are not readily accessible.   However, an estimate can be deduced from utilising some of the information made available.

From McDonald's Switzerland Environmental Report (2006):

• 2005 Total Energy consumption (oil, gas and electricity) in restaurants was 59m KWh with a total of 145 restaurants.   This equates to 0.4 GWh of energy usage per year per restaurant.

McDonald's restaurants follow a similar design, using the same production techniques and   similar types of kitchen appliances (Skanska 2009). Therefore, assuming the energy consumption figure above is approximately standard for all the 32,000 restaurants (Kitazume 2010) operating   worldwide, then 12.8TWh of electrical energy per year is required to feed those 60 million daily visitors.   To provide some context to this figure, a   Strathclyde University analysis (2002) calculated that the average three bedroom UK...