peer-reviewed no academic-content yes rightslink included Fig. 1.1: Environmental Defense Fund Staff, Richard Denison and Jackie Prince, Working in a McDonaldâs Restaurant, 1990.
Source: Photo courtesy of the Environmental Defense Fund.
Trash and a Clamshell
Itâs Halloween 1990 and the fate of the McDonaldâs first foray into a major societal conflict is at hand. McDonaldâs crafty top executive, Shelby Yastrow, is restless as he ponders the closing argument he will make to stop using the polystyrene foam (PSF) clamshell to the president of McDonaldâs USA, Ed Rensi.
Yastrowâs newfound and unlikely partner, Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) discussed their steady push to encourage McDonaldâs to dump PSF with his waste team in New York City. It was unusual because this type of corporateâNGO partnership was virtually unprecedented. Plus, their personalities are opposite, with Yastrow as the charmer and Krupp as the studious one. Both were focused and determined to do something big.
Little did I know then that Yastrow would soon become my future boss. At the time, he served as McDonaldâs general counsel. Although he knew that PSF was the perfect functional package, thanks to its properties for heat retention, protection, and portability, he also knew that it had become a public relations (PR) nightmare. Activists were relentlessly attacking the company and the package. Their claims that PSF was filling up landfills and was toxic in its production were resonating with the public.
Within McDonaldâs Oak Brook, Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright-ish-looking home office oasis, Mike Roberts, vice president of environmental affairs, was finalizing a big public announcement that the in-restaurant polystyrene recycling test program in place at the time would expand to all McDonaldâs eight thousand five hundred U.S. restaurants. I had managed the launch and the ongoing evolution of this recycling pilot program since 1989. It was a wreck.
Robertsâs bold plan had forced McDonaldâs to an eleventh-hour decision: Should McDonaldâs continue to try to save PSF by recycling it or should the company replace PSF with paper-based replacements advocated by EDF?
The center of attention was the infamous Big Mac PSF sandwich box. Though featherlight (at 98 percent air, it weighed just 1/100th of a pound), the package weighed heavily on McDonaldâs reputation because PSF had come to symbolize a societal war on waste.
It was ironic that as Yastrow observed the big PSF recycling expansion plan of Roberts, who reported to him, Yastrow was souring on the plan. Yastrow believed the three-year PR battle McDonaldâs had been waging was lostâand was getting even worse still. Because of the relentless public characterization of McDonaldâs as a symbol of waste, McDonaldâs reputation was getting more sullied every day. Yastrow had come to the conclusion that there were eco-friendly and functionally suitable paper-based alternatives that McDonaldâs could use instead.
But Rensi and Roberts were gung ho on PSF. They believed the PSF clamshell to be one of the best food service containers ever invented. Indeed, it has superior insulating qualities, itâs rigid enough to protect the Big Mac and other large sandwiches, and itâs cheap to boot. At the time, the clamshell cost just short of two pennies per unit.
From my perspective, I was confused. Yastrow versus Roberts: two leaders, same department, taking the company in different directions. I couldnât help but wonder how this was possible in a business known for consistency and conformity.
The PSF dilemma had started to develop about four years earlier. McDonaldâs had become a lightning rod for the growing garbage crisis because various environmental issues during the late 1980s converged to create fear across the United Statesâand around the globeâthat the amount of solid waste generated by citizens and businesses was escalating at an alarming rate. Soon, according to experts, we would run out of space to bury our trash.
The triggering event was a garbage barge. Motherboard magazine4 captured the beginning of the landfill crisis craze:
It was the spring of 1987, and a barge called the Mobro 4000 was carrying over 3,000 tons of itâa load that, for various reasons, North Carolina didnât want to take. Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history, a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.
As the Mobro meandered, environmentalist Lois Gibbs rose to prominence again. Gibbs had gained some fame a decade earlier by fighting the toxic landfill leaking pollutants into her community near Niagara Falls, New York. Now she was launching a national grassroots âMcToxics Campaignâ5 to end McDonaldâs use of PSF. Her organization, called Citizen's Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste (CCHW), was gathering support, especially from teachers, school children, and the media.
As with any campaign, whether based on truth or rumor, people rallied against a target. Fast food packaging, and especially McDonaldâs PSF disposable packaging, became the lightning rod for this antiwaste campaign.
It was the active involvement of children in this campaign that most disturbed McDonaldâs executives. An organization called Kids Against Pollution dovetailed with the emergence of CCHW, and together they coordinated a letter-writing campaign among school children that inundated McDonaldâs home office with thousands of letters and actual PSF containers. Kids were demanding that McDonaldâs get rid of Styrofoam.
The government wasnât on McDonaldâs side either. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had declared âA Solid Waste Dilemma,â with a report by the same name in early 1989. The report said â[e]ach of us is contributing 1300 pounds (annually) to the growing mountain of garbage.â It reported that one-third of all landfills in the United States would reach capacity by 1991.6
By 1990, dozens of communities in the Northeast and West Coastâfrom Suffolk County, New York, to Portland, Oregonâhad enacted or were considering PSF bans.
In my eyes, the defaming of the company I worked for and admired hit rock bottom when I saw the cover of a New Yorkâbased magazine twisting Ronald McDonald into Ronald McToxic. Indeed, the notion that McDonaldâs was a bad corporate citizen was new to all of us at McDonaldâs. Since the companyâs birth in 1955, McDonaldâs had always been viewed as a beloved local business. Neighborhoods welcomed and celebrated a new McDonaldâs. Through the first thirty years of McDonaldâs growth, McDonaldâs was golden, and the Golden Arches were an esteemed and unblemished icon. For millions of people, McDonaldâs had long been a simple oasis, a place that allowed families to have fun and eat good, quality food at an affordable price in clean restaurants. As the waste scandal captured headlines, no one at McDonaldâs was working on this emerging issue. It was hardly a blip on the radar.
I suddenly found myself at the forefront, a task that forced me to shift from dispatching truck drivers to journeying through the environmental field. But I was no environmentalistânot yet, anyway. I had had idealistic visions of changing the world in my youth. Most of my idealism had come from absorbing the values and causes of the socially conscious 1960s in my formative boyhood years: Kennedy, King, Kent State, the Vietnam War, peace and justice, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkelâall of that grabbed me through stinging social commentary and stirring protest songs.
But that kind of idealism didnât do much to help anyone find a job, especially considering that there werenât any jobs in corporate social responsibility (CSR) back then. So, when I graduated in 1983 from Northwestern Universityâs Kellogg School of Management with an MBA, I joined a privately owned supplier, HAVI, whose business at the time was dedicated solely to McDonaldâs packaging procurement and logistical support. Nobody has really heard of HAVI, but it is the largest supplier to McDonaldâsâeven more so than its sizable business with Coca-Cola and Cargill.
I managed the truck drivers who made deliveries to McDonaldâs Midwest restaurants. In 1988, my job was eliminated. Out of nowhere, George Macko, the head of a division of HAVI called Perseco, called me and asked me to consider a âtemporary environmental assignment.â Perseco served as McDonaldâs de facto packaging department, working with suppliers to test, implement, and purchase cups, napkins, bags, and polystyrene for all McDonaldâs restaurants.
Macko didnât mince many words. Macko told me that my new, temporary job was to save the polystyrene clamshell. He said I could handle the unknown ahead. After meeting with him, I had to look up P-O-L-Y-S-T-Y-R-E-N-E, which was far outside my area of expertise. Although I was blind to what this all meant, I accepted the position, and so began my adventurous, fulfilling, and uncharted journey in CSR.
Saving the Polystyrene Foam Clamshell
McDonaldâs invested in new actions, policies, and communications to defend and preserve the PSF clamshell. The best message the company had come up with to date was that McDonaldâs and all fast food waste made up just a small part of the nationâs solid waste stream: less than 0.3 percent. In my mind, this minimizing of the issue served as a denial and hurt us more, even though it was the truth. Denial makes people think you donât care and arenât doing your part. To make matters more confusing, McDonaldâs also argued that paper-based alternatives were no better for the environment than PSF containers.
The common belief was that paper is better than plastic. To bolster support of PSF, McDonaldâs had commissioned Franklin Associates, a leading life cycle assessment consulting company, to study the cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of PSF versus paper-based replacements. Because PSF is so lightweight, these studies favored PSF, arguing that PSF containers created less pollution in manufacturing and fewer impacts in transportation. Paper packaging is heavier, takes more materials to make and transport, and is derived from a dirty manufacturing process.
While all of this also was true, the message simply didnât resonate with activists or consumers. Nor did it seem intuitively true to the average consumer, who saw the visibly bulky PSF packages left on tables or in cars as excessive packaging.
McDonaldâs helped support the work of Dr William Rathje, a trash archeologist who had dug up waste from landfills and found newspapers that were still readable from decades ago. The resulting message was that no matter whatever material goes into a landfillâPSF or paper or plasticâit doesnât go away. I saw the truth of this firsthand when I went with Rathje and his crew to explore Staten Islandâs Fresh Kills Landfill, where we found all sorts of packaging, newspapers, and even food waste still intact. Amazing.
Ed Rensi recounted how McDonaldâs partially funded Rathjeâs work: âI wanted to get his research out in the public domain. Rathje was literally pulling out newspapers from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island from 1910 and earlier. Hot dogs that were buried amidst newspapers were still intact from the 1950s.â7
The garbologistâs revelations helped shift the discussion to the reality of landfills, which essentially are tombs designed to prevent the degradation of solid waste. As a result, all waste, including food, paper, and plastic, takes up permanent space.
Even so, Rensi did not want to give up the fight to keep using PSF. Seeing that nothing degrades in a landfill, not plastic, paper, or even food products, he said, âMy attitude was that ultimately science is going to prevail in this thing. McDonaldâs needs to hang tough and pretty soon the PR stuff would dissipate.â
He acknowledged that âwe were absolutely vilified in the news media and by activists groups.â Rensi wondered if Robertsâs vision of a national recycling program would fix the problem. âWe had all kinds of recycling things going on,â he recollected, âbut the fact of the matter is that recycling didnât deal with the fundamental issue: These social and environmental activists hated McDonaldâs, and [they] were using PSF as the lever to get McDonaldâs to do things that they wanted done.â
Although some argued that fast food companies were major contributors to landfills, McDonaldâs did take concrete actions to make a difference on environmental issues. At the end of 1989, for example, McDonaldâs announced its Rain Forest Policy, noting that it ânever has, and never will buy beef from recently deforested rainforests.â The policy was still in place as of 2018.
In addition, in 1987, McDonaldâs became the first restaurant company to phase out of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which were used as a blowing agent for PSF to provide its useful airy insulation properties. Even so, this move did little to take the pressure off McDonaldâs regarding PSF. (Indeed, we would learn years later that the replacement blowing agents had unintended consequences that heavily affected global warming.) CFCs had been identified as a primary contributor to creating a hole in the ozone layer, as reported by scientists in the mid-1980s. As National Geographic described it, â[t]he ozone layer is a belt of the naturally occurring gas âozone.â It sits 9.3 to 18.6 miles (15 to 30 kilometers) above Earth, and serves as a shield from the harmful ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation emitted by the sun.â8
Our earth-friendly initiatives continued despite these setbacks. Early in 1990, McDonaldâs announced McRecycle USA, a promise to purchase $100 million of recycled materials for the construction and equipment of its restaurants, one quarter of its annual construction budget. McRecycle USA was a huge commitment, and it became an effective program, actually stimulating recycling markets across various industries.
Unfortunately, actions and communication efforts like these were but feathers facing a fierce storm of criticism not only from activists but also from mothers, children, and politicians. All of this created a perfect storm of PSF bashing that seemed impossible to reverse, except for one remaining strategy.
With all these efforts failing to help McDonaldâs turn the corner on using PSF, the priority became the recycling of PSF. As the primary leader testing and expanding the recycling of PSF from our restaurants, this task fell into my hands.
It wasnât as easy as it might sound today. Recycling was not the norm back then. Residential recycling was only just emerging, and few companies within any industry had yet to dive feet first into recycling initiatives. McDonaldâs was no different, but we were certain we could make a difference in this area. The thinking was that if we could recycle the PSF used in our restaurants, consumers would accept this as a positive compromise, and we could continue using the perfect package.
We started to collaborate with leaders in the plastics industry who were investing in start-up ventures to recycle plastic packaging and bottles. In November 1988, Mobil Chemical (later to merge into ExxonMobil) and Genpak Corporation, a food service packaging company, set up a recycling operation in Leominster, Massachusetts, called Plastics Again, which was later absorbed by National Polystyrene Council, the trade association for the polystyrene manufacturers. Earlier that same year, the Amoco Foam Products Company established Polystyrene Recycling Inc. in Brooklyn, New York, in association with McDonaldâs.
I was knee deep with both the Amoco and MobilâGenpak projects, and both were failing for different reasons. The Brooklyn recycling center brought in all of the trash from all of the McDonaldâs restaurants in all six of New York Cityâs boroughs. It was a true Rube Goldberg setup. Only 5 percent of McDonaldâs waste is polystyrene. But far from transporting only polystyrene t...