Progress is slow, on reducing fast-food waste

Progress is slow, on reducing fast-food waste

When people talk about Fast food the first issues we associate with it are obesity or the chemicals used as additives to conserve or enhance the taste of the industrial processed food. But apart from that a lot of ecological problems are linked with Fast Food.

Fast food is generally sold in diverse forms of packaging. You can get drinks in paper cups, cups made of Styrofoam, cardboard boxes, boxes made of plastic. The list of packaging and materials used to sell the food in a convenient way are as diverse as the kind of dishes you can buy in the fast-food restaurants. But they have one thing in common; they are generally not reusable and therefore produce a lot of waste. In fact there are estimates that fast-food waste accounts for 20% of total waste production in the US, and are often carelessly thrown away to pollute the environment. This waste can take centuries to completely rot away, in case of plastic or Styrofoam cups, this can take up to 900 years.

 

Most fast food chains have taken measures to clean up their image, the big fast-food chains like Mc Donalds now sell some of their dishes in packaging made out of recycled paper. But this doesn’t change the fact that there are still too much plastic products used in fast-food restaurants. The flashy ink used to embellish their products, especially on their packaging made out of recycled material, stands in total contradiction to the image of an environmentally friendly company they want us to believe in.