McDonald’s Recycling Program

The editorial accolade for McDonald’s promotional campaign to recycle its enormously polluting products is naive. Despite the overkill of commercialized sentiment regarding Earth Day, environmental awareness did not hatch yesterday. It has been warned about for at least 20 years.

Heck, in 1971, our 8th-grade ecology teacher at Palms Junior High inspired our printing of ecology T-shirts, which we wore on our weekly bike rides to Marina del Rey to dig aluminum cans out of trash bins for recycling.

McDonald’s may not have known about the problems of plastics and landfills then, but it surely knows that decimating rain forests so cattle can be raised to produce its (and Burger King’s) beef is an unconscionable decimation of my planet.

McDonald’s is able to insulate itself from bad press by stuffing dollars into leaking dikes.

The good journalists and editors at The Times should be able to see the forest for the sake of the trees.

MITCH EARLE

Atlanta, Ga.