FT: McDonald’s to power trucks with cooking oil

Link to Financial Times article

McDonald’s to power trucks with cooking oil

By Jenny Wiggins, Consumer Industries Correspondent

Published: July 1 2007 22:03 | Last updated: July 1 2007 22:03

The oils that sizzle McDonald’s fries and chicken nuggets will soon also stoke its trucks, as the fast food chain starts converting its cooking oil into biodiesel.

McDonald’s plans to run its 155 UK delivery trucks on biodiesel made entirely from cooking oil collected from its restaurants by the end of the year.

The fast-food group, which to date has been running trucks on 95 per cent diesel and 5 per cent biodiesel, will initially use a blend of 85 per cent biodiesel and 15 per cent rapeseed oil.

The move is further evidence of the importance the group is attaching to overhauling its environmental image. A year ago, after a sustained campaign by Greenpeace, McDonald’s agreed to stop using soya from newly deforested land in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. This year, it started selling coffee certified by the Rainforest Alliance in its UK restaurants, a move that it says boosted sales by 10 per cent.

The group had previously been lambasted over everything from its treatment of animals to its use of environmentally harmful refrigerants.

Matthew Howe, manager of McDonald’s UK supply chain, said the cost of using biodiesel was expected to be the same as the restaurant group’s diesel costs in the long term. “In the short term, we think it will cost a little bit more,” he said, adding this extra cost could amount to “a couple of pennies a litre”.

The company expects to convert an annual 6m litres of oil, comparable to the 6.1m litres of diesel used in its trucks last year.

It will collect oil from 900 of its 1,200 UK outlets each week, take it to a separation tank in East Anglia, where food particles will be removed, and then on to a biodiesel conversion plant in Milton Keynes in central England.

McDonald’s could not say whether the vehicles involved in moving the oil around the UK would be fuelled by biodiesel themselves, but the company said the net effect of the scheme would be a 78 per cent reduction in its carbon emissions.

Francesca DeBiase, McDonald’s chief supply chain officer said the group’s European operation was an “early warning system” for the US.