The next time you eat french fries at McDonald's, rest assured that your purchase isn't just expanding your waistline and the profits of those golden arches, but is also adding to the restaurant's used oil supply.
Why should we care about used oil? In July of this year, McDonald's implemented a new recycling system in the UK for their used oil. Previously, their restaurants had been sending the used oil away to recycling plants at no benefit to the company. Their new plan, however, involves taking the excess vegetable oil from 900 restaurants in the UK and putting it back into the company by using it as fuel for the bulk of the McDonald's UK delivery trucks. This helps McDonald's save on gas prices and oil disposal costs while also allowing them to bask in positive PR for being a frontrunner in environmentally friendly businesses.
When the process of converting the UK's 155 delivery truck fleet to a vegetable oil system is complete, the environmental impact, according to a McDonald's press release, will be equal to taking 2,424 family cars (ie. Ford Focuses) off the road each year, or saving 1,675 tons of carbon. If this project proves successful, it is likely McDonald's will start implementing it in other countries, such as Canada and the United States.
It appears Ronald McDonald is starting to wear more green, and if even he is doing it, why isn't every environmentally conscious drive-thru customer turning to vegetable oil and biodiesel for their fuel needs?
Cashing in on free fuel
McDonald's is not the only entity reeling in on this opportunity. Mark Howards, the owner of a vegetable oil conversion company 3D Shapes in Sharon, Massachusetts, has worked with universities like Harvard and Roger Williams to find a better use for the vats of vegetable oil they previously threw away. At Harvard, he converted an Isuzu box truck-the truck the university used to pick up recycling-to use vegetable oil.
At Roger Williams, he converted a Ford shuttle bus to a vegetable oil system for on and off campus use. The shuttle, which will be used by many different drivers, will have "a system that can monitor times and temperatures and drives totally without any driver interaction regarding fuel," says Howards. "Universities are great places for these systems because they usually have a good supply of waste vegetable oil that they currently pay to have removed and they usually have lots of diesel vehicles."
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