When you hear the term ‘green restaurant’, greasy fast food chain McDonalds is pretty much the last thing that comes to mind. With a reputation for fostering obesity, bad health and environmental destruction by peddling rainforest grown meat, McDonald’s has been fighting a less-than-rosy public image for years. But now the country’s largest fast-food restaurant is hoping to change all that with the opening of their first ‘green’ restaurant in North Carolina — dubbed ‘green’ because the restaurant will offer electric vehicle charging.
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The McDonald’s features an array of green technologies and is designed to use as much
daylight as possible, comes equipped with highly efficient water and kitchen fixtures, and uses drought tolerant plants. The fitout makes use of materials like sunflower seed boards, wheat boards, bamboo and kirei boards.
Recycled materials were used in the construction of the building, and an energy efficiency dashboard provides real time updates about the restaurant’s green stats to guests.
But what really caught our eye was the deployment of the electric vehicle charging stations in the restaurant. These stations are powered by Novacharge and are part of the Chargepoint charging stations that we have covered before. It seems like a great idea to put charging stations in as many places as possible, and fast food restaurants seem like a truly ideal place for them – why didn’t anyone think of that before?!!
Of course, at the end of the day this is McDonald’s. We must give them props for moving in the right direction, green-technology-wise, at least. It would be considerably better if we could also see progress towards sustainability in their food as well. We can dream, can’t we?
+ McDonald’s deploys ChargePoint Network EV stations
Needless to say they will charge an arm and leg for the service. Much like they do for wifi.
This sounds great, but is this really reducing green house gas emissions? The energy to power the cars is still coming from somewhere – electricity. What is the electricity mix on the grid in North Carolina? over 50% of the electricity is produced from coal, the dirtiest form of electricity production. Charging EVs on a heavy coal based electricity grid actually produces more green house gasses than using an internal combustion engine run off gasoline. McDs, this sounds like you are going green, but in reality you could be producing more green house gases in doing this than doing nothing at all. Now a solution to this is if McDs were to install a wind turbine or solar pv system and charge the EVs off that. This would have much less life cycle emissions and actually produce emission reductions. McDs if you really want to become ‘green’ and not just have it be a gimmick, you have to look at the whole life cycle. Call me if you need consulting work.