Chalk One Up to Impulse : Environment: Normally, Fred Krupp would have sued McDonald’s to get the company to quit using its foam packaging. This time he simply said, ‘Let’s talk.’ It worked.
Can one letter be worth a thousand lawsuits? Environmental activist Fred Krupp is pondering the possibility. “We may be entering a new era of environmental problem-solving by negotiation,” he says.
Krupp is executive director of the powerful Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which was launched in 1967 with citizen lawsuits that led to banning of the pesticide DDT. Since then, the New York-based organization has successfully sued corporations to get lead out of gasoline, asbestos out of hair dryers and to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain, among other environmental reforms.
But EDF’s newest and most publicized victory--the banning of the polystyrene foam “clamshell” by fast-food giant McDonald’s--was triggered by Krupp’s impulse letter that suggested: “Let’s talk.”
“The tactic of just sitting down together has paid an important dividend,” Krupp said last week from his Manhattan office.
The announcement earlier this month by McDonald’s that it will substitute paper for its polystyrene boxes as an environmental measure, was a major news story. McDonald’s, the leader in the fast-food world, serves 22 million meals a day at its 11,300 restaurants worldwide, which means it also leads in dumping polystyrene and other waste into dwindling landfills.
It was the consideration of that waste that led Krupp, 36, to write his letter in the first place. He and his wife, Laura Devitt, live in suburban Connecticut and have sons, 5 and 3. “They love McDonald’s Happy Meals, which are French fries, a chocolate milkshake and Chicken McNuggets in little bags or boxes with a toy,” said Krupp, adding, “The toy is very important.”
He had his inspiration more than a year ago, on a McDonald’s family outing. “Alex and Zach were eating their Happy Meals and I was looking at all this packaging--six little Chicken McNuggets come in a big foam clamshell.” The clamshell, he knew, having served its restaurant function for about one minute, would be trashed and spend the next century taking up landfill space.
The trash problem was on Krupp’s mind. His organization had become alarmed by the rush to build incinerators around the world to burn garbage (which leaves toxic ash), to ease the problem of overflowing landfills. EDF was studying recycling as an alternative to landfills or incinerators, and had launched a major national recycling campaign with the Advertising Council with the motto: “If you’re not recycling, you’re throwing it all away.”
Although EDF estimates that the entire fast-food industry throwaway figure is about 2% of the garbage total, Krupp envisioned McDonald’s as a leader in helping to change all the habits of a throwaway society. “My idea was that if McDonald’s made major changes they could help set a new environmental ethic of what is acceptable and what isn’t,” he said. “I decided I would write a letter to McDonald’s, tell them they could solve these problems and suggest that I talk to them about it.”
Suggesting a talk was an unusual move for an action-oriented organization, he added. “We’ve achieved a lot of our results by suing people and we’ll continue to sue companies that need to be sued, but we were founded to solve environmental problems and our first goal is to achieve results.”
And he did. McDonald’s responded with an invitation to its corporate headquarters in suburban Chicago, the famed Hamburger University Campus, a complex of lakeside glass buildings in Oak Brook, Ill.
Krupp found a ready audience. “I can’t take credit for convincing them,” he says. (McDonald’s U.S.A. president Ed Rensi, when asked about EDF pressure, said that it had certainly hastened his company’s decision.)
“They are a well-run company and were knowledgeable and very concerned about the environment,” said Krupp. “They had already done things like shortening the length of their straws and repackaging their orange juice.”
The initial meeting launched a series of talks about the potential for a joint task force. The unusual aspect of an alliance between an environmental reform group and a corporation perceived as a polluter led to a number of ground rules, said Krupp, including the stipulation that EDF would not accept any money--not even travel expenses--from McDonald’s and that the EDF name would not be used in any marketing, advertising or point-of-sale material.
After a year of informal meetings, the two organizations announced last August that they were embarking on a six-month study, with teams of specialists from both organizations participating in a top-to-bottom study of how McDonald’s generates solid waste, and how the corporation could continue to meet customer needs while lessening its environmental impact.
The recent announcement of the polystyrene ban was just the first step, said Krupp. “The task force will continue to study things. We are analyzing how they could take their leftover waste--paper and food--and compost it into usable soil instead of loading it onto garbage trucks to a landfill. They are going to be testing that at four restaurants in Maine.
“I’m looking forward to more good things from this odd-couple relationship.”
He thinks the major news treatment awarded the first announcement was appropriate.
“The polystyrene clamshell is an icon,” he said, “a symbol of unnecessary form of waste. I think the fact that McDonald’s has put an end to it really could mark the turning of the tide on our throwaway society.”
Furthermore, he observed, the McDonald’s decision is a positive step, after a string of negative environmental images such as Love Canal, Garbage Barge and the Exxon oil spill. “I’m glad I wrote the letter,” he said. “I think it should serve as a lesson to everyone that when you have an opinion, you should let people know.”
