McDonald’s is good at branding, very good. The Golden Arches are recognised around the world. But another result of being good at branding is that their rubbish is instantly recognisable too.  You can tell there’s a McDonalds nearby not just from the big M that you will see illuminated from a distance, but sadly also, from the trail of litter proudly bearing the brand name.

Is this something that McDonald’s are concerned about, I wondered?  So, I thought I’d Google them and find out.

On their website I came across this:

“Our standard restaurant training includes a strong litter management component, with McDonald’s staff conducting frequent clean-ups of our restaurant grounds and the public spaces surrounding our restaurant parking lots. We also encourage our customers to help us by participating in anti-littering programs, and we include anti-littering messages on many of our packages around the world. ”

There’s quite a lot of information about what McDonald’s are doing to ‘green up the Golden Arches’, but this particular issue is still clearly a big problem.

Their customers are not reading the ‘anti-littering messages’ on the packages before they dump them at the side of the footpath. So what more do you think McDonald’s could be doing to avoid litter? Should they employ people to do ‘frequent clean-ups’ beyond the confines of the car-park and their own grounds?  Should they put the ‘anti-littering messages’ boldly on the door where customers can’t miss them?

Maybe there’s a high tech solution around the corner…. imagine that… the packaging might have a secret number which when scanned will link to the CCTV footage of the purchase and the persistent offenders will find themselves in their own show on McDonald’s TV shortly before they are delivered their fine for littering. Hmmmm… Food for thought.

My bicycle cart isn’t much good on snow days.  I just keep getting stuck and the cardboard box gets all soggy.  Yolanda said I should use Shanks’ pony, but it seems a bit rude – I don’t even know the guy – so I think I’ll just walk.

Glass is 100% recyclable and can be recycled endlessly with no loss of quality. Glass recycling creates no additional waste or by-products and recycling just one glass bottle saves enough energy to power a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred minutes, a computer for thirty minutes or a television for twenty minutes. For every six tons of recycled container glass used, a ton of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is reduced. Every ton of recycled container glass made into new containers saves 1.2 tons of raw materials. How cool is that!

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The other day Yolanda informed me that eating 5 sausages – even if they were pork and leek – didn’t count towards my five a day. My first thought was ‘Is this true?’ bUt most things Yolanda says turn out to be true, no matter how much you wish they weren’t. So the next thing I thought about was apples.

I like apples.

However …..

The apples on the tree in the community copse were nowhere near ready.  So I thought I’d try and buy some. It appears that we have run out of apples in the UK. The only apples my hard earned pennies could have bought had flown half-way round the world.  How’s that for a carbon footprint, I thought.

Yolanda always says ‘Don’t buy apples that have flown farther than a Virgin Atlantic 747′.

So today it was a toss-up between plums from Spain or nectarines from Italy. I plumped for the nectarines.

Gizmo