Delivery trucks to run on McDiesel
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Doug Krizner: The cooking oil used by McDonalds in the U.K. will soon go green-use. It’ll be recycled to power the company’s trucks. Jenny Wiggins is a reporter with the Financial Times in London. Jenny what’s the plan?
Jenny Wiggins: To create this biodiesel what they’re going to do is take the cooking oil from their restaurants, take it to a separation tank where they’ll get rid of all the bits of french fries all the other icky stuff, then they’re going to take it to a biodiesel conversion plant where the oil will be converted to biodiesel and then they’ll put that in their delivery trucks.
Krizner: Any sense about why McDonald’s is making this decision?
Wiggins: Well I think like other companies in the U.K. and Europe they feel under pressure not just to talk about their environmental strategy but to actually prove that they’re doing something to help the environment. Coincidentally, Cadbury-Schweppes has actually come out this morning and said that they are unveiling so to speak a new environmental strategy and they’ve set out a target for reducing their carbon emissions in half by 2020. And they also said that they’re going to be encouraging green activism within the company and encouraging their employees to become more environmentally conscious. I don’t think you would have heard a major company say that two or three years ago.
Krizner: Is this the kind of thing that will save the company money in the end, do you think?
Wiggins: No it’s probably going to be as expensive in the long run and in the short-term it’s actually going to be more expensive for McDonald’s to do this.
Krizner: Jenny Wiggins reports on the consumer industries for the Financial Times in London. Jenny thanks very much for joining us.
Wiggins: Thank you.
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