Fast food gets greenwashed

McDonald's, Burger King and Domino's Pizza take on token green projects but leave their carbon-intensive menus intact.

Thu, Jul 09 2009 at 4:56 PM

Don’t you love it when huge food corporations don’t actually make their food healthy and sustainable but make token attention-getting green moves? A few of note:

Domino's Pizza greenwashes with GreenGraffiti

>> Domino’s Pizza cleans streets with GreenGraffiti. Greenwashing — literally! Basically, the pizza company’s using a high-pressure water sprayer to create its American Legends pizza ads in L.A., NYC, and Philadelphia — then sending out press releases touting its “environmentally-friendly and potentially controversial marketing campaign.”

>> Burger King’s installing electricity-producing speed bumps. Writes Lloyd Alter in Treehugger: “Where do I start? With the carbon footprint of drive-in restaurants, to the idling while waiting for the burger, to the carbon footprint of raising meat and making hamburgers? The installation of this at a burger joint is laughable. The energy it will generate is negligible, and it probably will take 20 years to recover the energy in it’s manufacture.”

>>McDonald’s is putting in an EV charging station at a restaurant. Now you can charge up your electric car greenly while eating a cheeseburger with a gigantic carbon footprint!

Now, for one fast-food restaurant that’s doing it right:

>> Chipotle’s sponsoring free screenings of Food, Inc., an eco-docu that basically points out the huge problems — ranging from environmental concerns to immigration issues — posed by all the fast-food companies named above.

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Comment: 1

Tracey Shrier Jul 14 2009 at 8:28 PM

Before I even saw the last part about Chipotle, I was going to mention Food, Inc in here because I just read about it here http://tinyurl.com/l56gbe and I actually think there is a free screening tomorrow near me that I am going to try to catch. Just the saying in the synopsis "Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment." Its evident in

.... More

what you listed above about companies "trying" to do something green but not really changing a thing about the company at all!