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When you hear the term ‘green restaurant’, greasy fast food chain McDonalds ^[5] 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 ^[6].

The McDonald’s features an array of green technologies and is designed to use as much daylight ^[7] 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 ^[8] 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 ^[9] and are part of the Chargepoint ^[10] 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 ^[6]