Mcdonald’s China has announced that the company will stop using plastic straws as of Jun 30 for both dine-in and take-out meals in nearly a thousand restaurants across Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. This decision is the first of many environmentally-friendly initiatives resulting from McDonald's China's new concept “Because of love, do it best,” which was launched in May of this year.
Unless they happen to have their own reusable straw, consumers will now sip most drinks – bubble teas will still come with the requisite thick straw – through the redesigned cup's lid (which, unfortunately, is still made of plastic). The fast-food giant aims to implement this reform for all restaurants in Mainland China by the end of this year, which will effectively reduce plastic consumption by approximately 400 tons per year.
Despite the fact that the move coincides with a national mandate to do away with plastic straws by the end of this year, McDonald's is keen to let people know that the decision was theirs and theirs alone. As Zhang Jiayin, CEO of McDonald’s China explained:
“McDonald’s love goes beyond deliciousness and service. We also love the community and environment where we are and strive to build a ‘beautiful China.’ We believe the ‘small step’ of reducing the use of straws on the scale of McDonald's can be a ‘big step’ for sustainable development. In the past ten years, we have continued to carry out the ‘green packaging’ movement – in 2007, we took the lead in replacing plastic bags with paper bags, a cumulative reduction of more than 2.5 billion plastic bags; in 2010, Mcflurry changed to paper cup packaging, a cumulative reduction of more than 500 million plastic cups; in 2015, the size of the knife and fork was optimized, reducing the amount of plastic used by about 10%. In 2020, all of our paper packagings comes from original paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).”
The new war on plastic straws comes is just one in a series of promising changes for Beijing's commerce, including reinforced rules against free plastic bags and regulations for food delivery packaging.
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Image: Huaxi
The headline could be more concise, no? "McDonald Dumps." As in, each meal a culinary sagging diaper. But, hey, now that they're like all good for the environment and stuff, we Greens gotta start meeting there.
Meh. I never got anything to drink at McD's and I gave up cow years ago. Occasionally I would get a sausage mcmuffin and snag a few straws for powering through a bottle of red wine.
