Tinkering with Packaging: McDonalds Looking For Ways to Suck Less

McDonalds is a GIANT corporation. I read somewhere that 27,000,000 people eat at the Golden Arches every day. I’m no fast food saint- I admit a lifelong love affair with the Big Mac. I know how disgustingly unhealthy they are (and everything else they serve), I’ve seen Super Size Me a bunch of times, but damn it all if it’s not tasty.

Anyways, McDonalds is responsible for a lot of solid waste via those 27 million daily customers and I guess they’ve been working to reduce the impact from all those thrown away fry containers and to-go bags. Here’s a video I found at Environmental Leader of Jennifer McCracken, environmental manager for McDonald’s global packing supplier showing some of the ways they are trying to make their negative eco foot print less devastating.

Video via [Environmental Leader]

Florida Senator Pushing Bill to Require Restaurants to Have “Enough” Toilet Paper on Roll

There was a bit of an uproar last year when Sheryl Crow proposed a limitation on how much toilet paper people can use in a sitting. She got ripped on by the right wing hate mob (lead by traffic god Matt Drudge) and she had to do a bit of back peddling to point out that she was joking.

I don’t think Florida State Senator Victor Crist (R) got the memo on that one- he’s proposing a bill that would require restaurants to have “enough” toilet paper on hand for their customers. The Florida Senate Regulated Industries Committee actually approved the bill, though it has a few steps to go before it becomes law. It’s good to know that with all the crazy shit happening in the world, politicians are watching our back(side) on the really important things.

Link [CBS4]

Memo to Bush: Distributing the 2,220 Page Budget in PDF Format is NOT Green

Want to hear a good joke? George Bush’s $3 trillion budget is “green”.

Not because it budgets funds to support the growth of renewable energy. Not because it removes the subsidies gas and oil companies receive. And not because it tightens regulations over toxic chemicals.

No, it’s “green” because they didn’t print it out. This year they are skipping out on printing the 2,200 page budget and passing it around to Congress and journalists in PDF format.

I’m not surprised in the least bit. Bush has pretty much made it his administrations signature move to do very stupid things and then to lie about it. This one is a pretty minor bit compared to Iraq, warrent-less wire tapping, and everything Dick Cheney does.

339 Days, 15 Hours, and 9 Minutes left in the Bush Administration…

Link [Ecogeek]

New York City Honors Winning Giants by Showering Tons of Litter on Them

So the stupid NY Giants beat my team in a little football game you may have seen on Sunday and New York City threw them a tickertape parade yesterday. A couple of thousand pounds of shredded paper and five TONS of confetti later and the Big Apple has one big ass mess to clean up. Green Daily wonders How green is a ticker tape parade?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you know that the New York Giants won the Super Bowl on Sunday. In order to fully celebrate their unanticipated win against the New England Patriots, the City of New York is throwing a parade in the team’s honor today (it started about half an hour ago)! As is the tradition, the parade will be a ticker-tape one (actually it will be mostly shredded newspaper, ticker-tape is hard to come by these days). The city is anticipating that approximately 5 tons of confetti will flutter down over the course of the parade today.

The New York Times has an article about the festivities but doesn’t say jack about how or if all that paper waste is going to get cleaned up. In the face of all the oil spills , depleted uranium bullets flying around, and smokestacks in the world a couple of tons of paper being wasted maybe isn’t such a big deal, but it’s still an interesting ungreen end to a depressing story. 18-1 sucks.

Link [Green Daily] & [New York Times]