W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

Recently, on the same day, both BanTransFats.com Inc. and a San Francisco radio show host filed lawsuits in California against McDonald's. They charged that the company's delay in its September 2002 promise to reduce trans-fatty acids in the cooking oil of its fried foods constituted false advertising. So the fast food giant is back in a very public war zone.

Anyone who works in the solid-waste arena is no stranger to the battles between what consumer-advocate groups want for consumers, what consumers as individuals are willing to pay for with their dollars, and what is good for society and the environment in the long run. Perhaps there are some lessons for us all in McDonald's' classic struggle with the public's perceptions of their burger wrappers.

During the early 1970s, McDonald's came under attack from those concerned about the number of trees cut down to make the paper that went into the wrappers that satisfied America's burgerlust.

Citing what has become a corporate mantra—"We sell burgers, not packages"—McDonald's responded by hiring a state-of-the-art environmental consulting firm to consider available packaging options. The costly report concluded that to be environmentally sound, McDonald's should switch from paper to foam packages (EPF, expanded polystyrene foam or polyfoam—what most folks call Styrofoam, but what isn't—more on that in another column).

Virtually all players ignored the fact that burger-wrapping paper was not made of pulp from old-growth forests, but instead from fast-growing southern pines grown on tree farms. No one noted that when tree farms cannot find markets for quick-growth trees, they shift crops to high-fertilizer and low-oxygen producers like cotton—the end result being something like clear-cutting forest in the Amazon, eh!

In 1976 McDonald's shifted from paper to foam containers for its larger hamburgers and some other foods.

Much to its surprise, McDonald's found it had traded one convenient target for an even-more-potent bull's-eye. And the opponents of foam were even more vocal than the friends of trees—protesting the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the creation of polyfoam as well as the sheer waste they argued discarded foam represented in landfills.

Based on widespread public misperceptions of its actual volume in landfills (only a small fraction of the 0.5% of all fast food wastes) and the belief that paper biodegrades rapidly in landfills (which it doesn't), the polyfoam issue received sustained attention. Communities across the country—Berkeley, CA, then Portland, OR, and Suffolk County on Long Island in New York—took steps to ban polystyrene foam. In 1987 McDonald's sought to dampen the controversy by announcing that its suppliers would stop using traditional CFCs in their polyfoam and switch to a variant form of blowing agent that depleted 95% less ozone.

Note that McDonald's did not mention that blowing agents of EPF accounted for less than 2% of the CFCs released into the atmosphere—the vast majority of CFCs, in fact, came from refrigerators (both commercial and home) and car, office, and home air conditioners. (Hey, but what activists and legislators had the backbone to call for bans of CFCs from those sources?)

Protests continued. Schoolchildren (perhaps helped by adults?) formed an organization called Kids Against Pollution, and their cute protests against fast food packaging became the subject of feature stories in local news everywhere. (The average elementary-school student is probably unaware, incidentally, that every month he or she throws away at school the equivalent by weight in edible food of 300 Big Mac foam clamshells.)

McDonald's and its polyfoam suppliers set up a recycling program for polystyrene to be announced in fall 1990. In recycling, the biggest challenge after finding a market is being able to collect homogeneous quantities of a given commodity in great volume—something that McDonald's, with 9,000 outlets nationwide at the time, was uniquely suited to do.

But this recycling dream never materialized. For reasons that remain unclear, McDonald's abruptly decided in November 1990 to abandon polyfoam completely, in favor of "quilt wrap" (a plastic-coated paper less bulky than foam, but recyclable only with great difficulty) for hamburgers.

The McDonald's decision was hailed almost universally as a victory for the environment. But if an environmental victory, it was an equivocal one.

A few months after McDonald's made its announcement, Martin B. Hocking, a chemist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, published an article titled "Paper Versus Polystyrene: A Complex Choice" in the journal Science, the most respected scientific peer-review journal in the world.

Hocking's aim was to compare the "environmental merit" of paper and polyfoam packaging by focusing on the manufacture of single-use hot-drink cups.

His conclusions contained surprises. First, he wrote, the production of paper for a paper hot-drink cup consumes as much in the form of hydrocarbons (oil and gas) as does the manufacture of a polyfoam cup (which is largely made of hydrocarbons). Moreover, the production process for the paper cup requires a great many more chemicals than does that for a polystyrene cup: for paper, 160 to 200 kilograms of chemicals per metric ton of wood pulp, versus about 33 kilograms per metric ton of polyfoam.

On a per-cup basis, Hocking found the air emissions from the production of polyfoam to be about 60% lower than those from the making of the paper hot-drink cup. Of course, Hocking observed, even if the polystyrene is blown up with pentane rather than with CFCs, there will be a negative effect on the ozone, but he added that polystyrene's "contributions to ozone and as a 'greenhouse gas' are almost certainly less than those of the methane losses generated from post-use disposal of paper cups in landfill sites." (Well, to be fair, one must add this proviso: "if the paper cups biodegrade.")

A paper-industry spokesperson and several scientists engaged Hocking vigorously. Hocking conceded a few points but fundamentally stood his ground.

Perhaps the matter is a wash. The lesson to remember about this particular foray into substituting market-driven packaging with consumer-advocate-approved packaging is that after an enormous amount of activism by thousands of very concerned people over the course of more than a decade, and after the expenditure of enormous sums of money by McDonald's to make the switch, and after all the considerable dislocations among McDonald's suppliers less bulky than foam, but recyclable only with great difficulty—after all this, there would seem to be very little to show in terms of any real amelioration of the environmental-garbage situation. The famous phrase of the poet Horace about "laboring to bring forth a mouse" may very well apply to these circumstances—except that in Horace's case at least you ended up with one live and healthy mouse!

Just a Couple of Relevant Notes

Polyfoam totaled only some 4% by weight of all the garbage produced by McDonald's overall. Most of the garbage produced by the franchises—45%—was always plain old cardboard (for the packages that buns, patties, napkins, bags, and so on came in) and paper bags, straw covers, and more. So since 1990 there has just been that much more paper.

Many at McDonald's were very unhappy with the abrupt polyfoam/quilt wrap switch, especially, I was told, because the food inside degraded in taste and texture so rapidly. At McDonald's University—the corporate training camp—students are exquisitely sensitized to the most minute transformations in food, so I took these concerns as merely insider grips.

Then, one day, I was on the phone with a "fact checker" from House & Garden magazine. At one point she off-handedly asked, "What happened at McDonald's? I'm sure they had their reasons to switch from Styrofoam to paper, but the burgers just don't taste the same anymore—even if you eat them right there!"

So what is the lesson? As I've documented a few times before in these columns, public perception is nine-tenths of the law—even if the public in the end won't buy what they said they wanted! McDonald's made an abrupt executive decision before it had well-rounded scientific evidence. In such a rush to judgment, everyone (except self-serving special-interest groups) pays the price.

Archeologist and Contributing Editor W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - September/October 2004