4th July 2012
There is currently increased interest in sustainability with McDonald’s paving the way in environmentally friendly measures. The ubiquitous fast food chain has recently released details of a recyclable restaurant which is to be its flagship branch at the Olympic Park this summer. Recyclable restaurant, well what do you mean, we hear you cry. How can you make an entire restaurant recyclable? Well the answer to that is that it will be picked up and reused in another location, meaning that none of the building materials are wasted. That's sort of the case anyway – 75 per cent of the restaurant will go into making up some of the 15 new establishments planned for completion in the UK over the next year. Jill McDonald, chief executive officer of McDonald's UK, highlighted that this year's Games are set to be the most sustainable yet and the firm wanted to fit into that ethos. She said: "Our flagship restaurant features many of the innovations that have fuelled our transformation during the last five years to improve the customer experience and increase the efficiency of our business operations." Such measures could lead to the McDonald's restaurant inside the Olympic Park looking somewhat makeshift, but this is of course not the case. McDonald's is one of the biggest sponsors of the Games and it has taken five years of innovation and three years of design to come about, so the chances are it will look and perform like any other McDonald's restaurant anywhere in the world. It is what happens to it afterwards that will be different. So does this spell the end of the humble burger van as events caterers decide to opt for more permanent looking structures in future? Probably not, after all most events don't last as long as the Olympics and Paralympics and not even the biggest festivals have the same amount of hype attached to them. McDonald's recyclable restaurant may cut the cost to the environment but it is likely to cost a lot on the company's purse.
