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Behind McDonald's switch from plastic to paper lies a plot reminiscent
of a long bedroom farce. Relationships shift with dizzying speed; characters'
interpretations of the same events vary vividly; children (while remaining
mostly offstage) are pivotal to the dramatic tension; and nearly every
character feels, at one time or another, that he was deeply betrayed.
At the center of the drama, as with many farces, is a heretofore all-powerful
patriarch who, for the first time in his life, notices that his virility
might be dissipating. His struggles - to understand that loss, to ward
off the bludgeons of fate and yet hold true to the roots of his power
- give the drama its tragicomic spirit. In this case, however, the faltering
patriarch is not a person, but a corporation.
No ordinary corporation could play the role. It requires McDonald's unique
cultural cachet as a symbol (even a cliche) for America and Americans.
In such exotic outposts as France, Holland, and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury,
McDonald's' restaurants serve as embassies from mainstream America, with
concomitant squareness and civility. It's significant that perestroika
arrived around the same time that McDonald's bought land for its first
restaurant in Moscow, after 14 years of trying to get in.
Most of the worldwide chain's 12,000 restaurants, of course, are located
in the miracle-mile bazaars of American suburbia, where golden arches
became the de facto inspiration for the visual ambiance of the road. With
this intimate presence, even McDonald's executives admit that the company
belongs to American people in some psychic (albeit non-financial) way;
because of its scale and influence, we all have a stake, whether we eat
hamburgers or not, in what McDonald's does. (Indeed, the most consistently
cogent commentator on the firm is the magazine Vegetarian Times.) Thus,
when McDonald's abruptly moved from polystyrene clamshells to paper hamburger
wrappers last fall (along with 40 more subtle changes), that decision
belonged to all of us, open to our scrutiny just as much as a government
decision should be.
McDonald's and its partner, the Environmental Defense Fund, have taken
an "aw shucks, we're just getting our own house in order" public
stance; and other actors (notably the plastics industry) have said it
won't affect them much. Nonetheless, the ramifications clearly will ripple
out far beyond the golden arches. The advocacy power of citizen's groups
(like the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes) has been given
a dramatic boost; no target is so large it can ignore insistent grass-roots
lobbying, especially if it involves school groups. Plastics recycling
has been chastened; the industry's grandiose promises are being toned
down to smaller, more definable goals.
The practitioners of "lifecycle analysis," an academic technique
for comparing the cost and effects of particular products, will be ever
more visible; you'll see the fruits of such analyses in news stories to
come. Joint projects like the one between McDonald's and the EDF will
flourish, some with and some without the safeguards on which the EDF insisted.
The only thing that won't change is advertising; we won't see "holier-than-thou"
commercials between the fast-food rivals. We won't need them. As in any
bedroom farce, the virtue of the principal players has come under the
harsh stagelights of public display, and nothing will ever be the same.
To begin the drama, we might go back to the mid-1970s, when McDonald's
was at its peak - the first, biggest, and only independently owned major
fast-food chain. (Heublein owned Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi owned Taco
Bell, and Pillsbury owned Burger King.) McDonald's uniformity on the outside
(in which every beef patty weighed exactly 1.6 ounces worldwide) was matched
by its success-bred arrogance on the inside. Every prospective franchise
owner, for instance, agreed to give up other entrepreneurial interests,
operate the business full-time, relocate where stores were available (which
might be hundreds of miles away), and attend the famous "Hamburger
University" for two years - full-time. There were also strict rules
about investment capital, and McDonald's owned the land under the restaurants.
Nonetheless, being a franchise owner is profitable enough that McDonald's
still gets 20,000 applicants per year, of which they accept 200.
Culturally, the corporate office was unremittingly mainstream, probably
much more so than their customers in the 1970s. A then-franchise owner
named Mirick Friend recalls a national meeting in which he suggested that
the company offer salads and other less salt laden foods. "Lettuce
is for flower children," replied the McDonald's executive who had
the floor, a fast-tracking, charismatic, somewhat brash man named Edward
Rensi. (He's now company president.) Nonetheless, Rensi and his peers
were concerned about environmentalism.
In 1976, the company commissioned Stanford Research Institute, a think
tank with the reputation for translating wild-eyed New-Age ideas in a
way that even executives could appreciate them, to research environmental
measures. FDA regulations about food contamination ruled out using recycled
paper to wrap Big Macs. But polystyrene clamshells would save trees, save
manufacturing costs, save energy, and use up byproducts of oil refining.
Moreover, "garbage-to-energy" incineration was in vogue, and
polystyrene was valued in the incinerator; it burned hot, helped break
down complex molecules in other garbage, and produced, per pound at least,
more heat and thus more energy. And it led to the invention of the much-ballyhoo'ed
McDLT, where polystyrene (a cousin of "styrofoam" insulation)
separates the hot meat from the cold lettuce.
But the huge investment in adopting polystyrene for so many restaurants
meant an ideological commitment to it - and that commitment had to weather
an increasing number of storms. When the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer
was reported, those chemicals had to be phased out of polystyrene manufacture,
and replaced with HCFCs (hailed as harmless, now seen as only marginally
safer). Landffll crunches, unforeseen in the 1970s, began prompting local
bans on polystyrene around 1987. The fact that plastic litter stays around
longer than paper no doubt prompted much of the reaction; people saw the
slug- and mustard-colored clamshells bobbing in streams and ditches.
McDonald's responded by prototyping two "Archie McPuff 'incinerators,
meant for behind the restaurants - an idea immediately unpopular with
citizens' groups - and by joining the plastics industry's hastily assembled
polystyrene-recycling efforts. McDonald's sought advice from enviromental
groups like the Environmental Action Coalition in New York, an astute
recycling-oriented organization (whose book Plastics: America's Packaging
Dilemma was published this year by Island Press).
By mid-1990, McDonald's was the most visible player in the polystyrene-
recycling movement, making a heroic effort led by a senior corporate vice
president named Shelby Yastrow.They had about 600 bins installed in restaurants
(mostly in New England and New Jersey) where people could drop off the
clamshells and polystyrene cups; the containers were trucked to central
warehouses (one west of Boston, another in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn),
shredded, and offered to plastic-durables companies like Rubbermaid. In
part because McDonald's customers couldn't be counted on to do all the
separation right (paper wrappers made their way into the plastics bins),
the quality of the plastic was poor; Rubbermaid complained to the New
York Times about it. And the costs of shipping all that puffy, lightweight
crystallized plastic, plus the fact that at least half the polystyrene
left McDonald's restaurants in take-out bags, made many people skeptical
that recycling could ever work. The result was, perhaps, inevitable.
Again, McDonald's the icon became a symbol - this time for unbridled
trash. Starting in Vermont, then spreading to New Jersey, and ultimately
throughout the nation, the McDonald's boycott campaign of 1989 and 1990
erupted. The Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, which coordinated
and promoted the campaign, had discovered an organizing gold mine, much
better than a mere national march that the media would label the work
of eco-extremists. Their "Ronald McToxic" caricature was, in
effect, an anti-brand
name. Each local group used it a different way - battling landfills or
incinerators by holding up a clamshell and saying, "See? This is
what we're
burying or burning - and we don't yet know what toxics it may release."
Merri Capatosto, the McDonald's vice president of public relations,
says the
McToxic campaign had little influence on the company's decision; they
were considering change as early as 1987. Even the new paper-and-polyethylene
wrappers had been developed by 1989 by a paper supplier (for use by Taco
Bell, according to an industry veteran, and apparently unbeknownst to
McDonald's).
Nonetheless, there's little doubt that the campaign affected McDonald's
people emotionally, particularly the franchise holders. They felt especially
betrayed by schoolchildren, who took up the McToxic cause, dressing
up as clowns in floppy shoes and cotton-candy hair, and sending back their
grimy, gloppy used clamshers to Shelby Yastrow's office.
McDonald's executives say, disingenuously, that those protests were sparse
and staged for Time magazine. But they got the message; the company itself
had underwritten a World Wildlife Fund booklet for schools, called Wecology,
which told kids to write directly to companies whose practices bothered
them. Moreover, McDonald's was also under siege from anti-cholesterol
crusaders using similar public-sympathy tactics. The company began looking
for ways to make significant change without giving the impression that
they would give in easily to any special-interest group that came along.
As it happened, the Environmental Defense Fund approached them, late
in 1989, seeing an opportunity to influence the whole industry. EDF had
been formed in the late 1960s by a group of aggressive Long Island
lawyers and scientists, battling DDT spraying under the motto "Sue
the
bastards!" They gradually softened their stance, but continued to
focus on
legal cases where they had done massive technical homework. The deal
they hammered out with McDonald's was unique in both environmental
and corporate history: They would form a joint task force. EDF would become,
in effect, unpaid advisors, with near-complete access to the company's
data. They'd work in the restaurants, talk to suppliers, and generally
investigate every aspect of the business.
Then the task force would submit a plan; McDonald's would choose what
aspects to adopt, but EDF could publish their own report for McDonald's
competitors to learn from. It was, in fact, an enlightened way to operate.
And it produced, ultimately, an enlightened set of proposals: Phasing
out bleached paper. Reusing shipping palettes. Testing reusable cups,
shipping containers, and coffee filters. Recycling polyethylene shrink-wrap.
Composting eggshells and coffee grounds. Buying recycled materials (including
plastic-lumber tables and chairs). Perhaps most enlightened was the idea
that no solution would be permanent; McDonald's (with or without EDF)
would continue to experiment, pushing packaging suppliers to develop lower-waste
materials, developing pilot projects and then rolling them out at all
12,000 stores - in short, becoming as resilient with its waste as it was
at introducing new foods.
In that context, the switch to a nonrecyclable paper wrap (because it
is laminated to polyethylene) was never seen as final. The immediate rationale
for the switch was based on the hierarchy of waste-management practice,
which says that reducing the amount of material used is better than recycling
a substitute, because of the extra effort, energy, cost, and current inefficiencies
of the recycling process. As the task force made its case, protests erupted
within the company. The plastics advocates (like Yastrow) had worked with
their peers (at Dow and Mobil, for example) for two years; they were just
about to announce a route-out of the polystyrene recycling program to
all 8,500 American restaurants. This task force was a comparative upstart.
Meanwhile, CCHW members flooded the EDF and McDonald's with anti-
plastic phone calls. After three days of wrangling, a decision was made.
McDonald's plastics-recycling partners were informed few hours before
the New York Times reported it. That article included a statement from
company
president Edward Rensi: The plastic clamshell packaging was enviromentally
sound, he said, "but our customers don't feel good about it, so we're
changing." The plastics people had their turn to feel betrayed. Unaware
of the task force's technical rationale, they thought McDonald's was sacrificing
their project in favor of public-relations hype.
Now the farce kicked into high gear. It says something about the haphazard
priorities of corporate environmentalism that only one recent lifecycle
analysis of paper versus plastic fast-food containers existed at that
time. It
had been compiled by a small mom-and-pop consulting firm called Franklin
Associates, located near Kansas City, who were to lifecycle analysis what
Doc was to medicine in Gunsmoke: the only game in town.
Hired by a plastics-industry association group called the Council for
Solid
Waste Solutions, they had compared the ecological effects of polyethylene-
coated paperboard - the kind used in a Burger King box - to polystyrene
clamshells. They tried, as Franklin told me, to "stay away from a
win/lose analogy," but their tally sheet nevertheless favored polystyrene
over paperboard. It cost 30 percent less energy to make, and its manufacture
released at least 40 percent fewer effluents into air and water. A Canadian
chemistry professor named Martin,Hocking, in a much quoted article in
Science magazine in February, made similar points about plastic coffee
cups.
Thus, in late 1990 and all this year, ads (from plastics recyclers) and
articles have appeared citing those studies. One of the most strident
appeared in Forbes, a magazine that often tweaks environmentalists: It
implied that
McDonald's was blackmailed by the Citizen's Clearinghouse and hoodwinked
by the EDF into a decision without technical support. Unfortunately, however,
the proplastics counter-charges depend on a misinterpretation of the Franklin
study: It never compared the two McDonald's wrappers, but only a choice
that McDonald's never made - the stiff cardboard box. Franklin themselves
said later that the paper wrap was the best of the lot (ecologically speaking)
- and plain butcher paper would be better still. At this writing, few
people know which side to believe.
The EDF people, who say coyly that they never anticipated the public
scruti-
ny, suddenly had their turn to feel betrayed. They never did manage to
get
the idea across that the new paper wrap would take up less room in landfills.
Why, people asked, should it be going into landfills in the first place?
It didn't
help that, as director Nancy Wolf of the Environmental Action Coalition
points out, the paper wrap they chose is not only laminated to polyethylene,
but also bleached with chlorine. In the turmoil, the most important point
made by Franklin and Dr. Hocking, the hfecycle analyzers, was somehow
lost: that you can't generalize these choices from cups to boxes to wrappers.
Every container decision is different; the impact varies, for instance,
depending on how far supplies must be trucked in, and how far recyclable
materials must be trucked away. As recycle analysis becomes a more exact
science, we may find a McDonald's in Peoria using plastic, while its counterpart
in Patchogue opts for paper.
Like most farces, this one may end more-or-less happily. Plastics manufacturers
are now focussing on institutions that still use polystyrene -
most schools, hospitals, and work places, at least until theyall get around
to franchising their cafeterias to McDonald's.
McDonald's, meanwhile, is looking into composting its paper wrap - and
coping with customers who complain that the sandwiches are cold.
One thing everyone agrees upon: What McDonald's does will be enormously
influential, if only because it will press its paper suppliers to offer
new wraps. Those paper companies have salespeople who won't shrink from
saying to their other customers, "Didn't you read what McDonald's
is doing?"
In general, marketing savants throughout American industry are trying
to come to terms with consumers these days. Advertising seems not to work
as well; consumers seem better educated than they ever have been. Still,
education only goes so far; fast-food people still talk about the blazing
defeat of Dee-Lite's, a fast-food chain that pitched nutritional value.
In the drama of McDonald's, then, the most important player may be us:
a hundred-rnillion-member Greek chorus, hardly monolithic, yet passing
judgment
every day. Their perception of our moodiness has forced McDonald's executives
to become ever more resilient, even to the point of embracing environmentalism.
Indeed, the environment-sensitive consumer may lose every concrete, tangible
reason to despise McDonald's.
Only the fact of its existence will be left, and its cumulative effect
on American cuisine, architecture, and culture as restaurants fan out
across miracle miles, compelling and yet somehow awful in their numbers:
thirty billion served. ©
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