Obviously Greenwashing

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Cholesterol Days

Currently watching my cholesterol levels for the month of July. As the doctors ordered, strictly I need to stop myself from consuming fast food products such as burgers and fries and anything fried with too much cheese. Loathing fast food sometimes make sense.

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LLDA shuts down 3 restos for pollution | Manila Standard Today

LLDA shuts down 3 restos for pollution | Manila Standard Today

I never thought that I would hear this kind of news again. It was for this reason that I started this blog around three years ago. Three years ago,  I was part of the LLDA Technical Working Group (TWG) for the development of effluent standards for the industry.

The point of the TWG was to develop specific effluent standards applicable to the quick serve restaurant.  I am not sure if such standards were really developed. BOD of 1000 mg/L has been common among QSR and other restaurant establishment, but the point is efforts within the facilities must be implemented or any means of pollution prevention must be integrated in the system prior to final discharge.  The QSR group is lobbying for raising the lowering the effluent standard from 50 mg/L BOD to 500 mg/L BOD. Since it is more than three years and I have no communication with the people involved in the TWG, I am not sure what progress has been made.

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Re-accessing Fast Food Greenwash

Blogger has changed its format and I could not seem to access my fastfood greenwash blog for quite some time. I even RIPd it in wordpress blog Ecomaray. It is such a relief to know that my old posts were not lost and I can still find those thoughts that erupted after my short but productive stint in the fast food industry.

Looking at Job Boards, McDonald's Corporation is currently looking for a Sustainability Manager based in their corporate offices. It is a good start, but hopefully they won't get that manager from the radical left. With the impacts of climate change now being felt, fast foods must change their strategies to ensure survival.


I am still thinking about getting hosted url...but not for now, I'm just in survival mode. Some housekeeping has to be done for now.

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Blessed Unrest

I have decided in the long run that I do not want to spend the rest of my life working for the fast food industry. I am in the process of reading Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest on the part of how corporations have maintained their power grip on society for them to continuously exist.

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Hello Fast Food

I am just wondering, I can't seem to access my blog for quite a while. Hope it still does exist...

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Looking Back and the New Year Ahead...

It's now 2010.  Honestly, I am no longer connected with the fastfood sector. I chose to come back to do academic research and extension which I have no problem with in terms of principles. Looking back, what could be the purpose of my being involved in the fastfood industry?

As part of my academic responsibilities, I attended a workshop for our National Council for Sustainable Development which had been hibernating for quite a while. I was noticeably a new face and most of those involved were quite young but the dilemma right now is resuscitating the concept back towards mainstream knowledge. The meeting were mostly composed of technical and academic people mostly involved in policy research and I realized people like these are not easily encountered by fast food people and it seems I could work out my purpose there.

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McDonald’s Puts Green Design into New Restaurant

Posted on Thursday, Jul. 09, 2009

Watts are free at new McDonald's

By SUE STOCK

When it opens Tuesday, the McDonald's at 1299 Kildaire Farm Road will be the country's first McDonald's with an electric vehicle charging station. The station will allow drivers of electric cars to plug them in and charge them while they eat. McDonald's is one of several chains exploring green store design. Wal-Mart and Target are revamping their stores to conserve energy. Subway has opened its first stand-alone LEED-certified restaurant in the state in Chapel Hill.

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There seems to be a rush to go to the LEED-way of fast food restaurants, is it a good thing or is it greenwashing?

For me, I think this is a start, though these companies are cashing in on the fact that they are certified is questionable, the hand of PR and Marketing always does some hocus pocus per se. 

I am not really familiar on the LEED standard in terms of architectural planning and construction but during the operation of the proposed site, the critical measure is its actual overall resource efficiency over time compared with the existing rate of resource use in an average fast food store.

Let's not limit ourselves to the WOW factor of building designs....show us the Numbers!

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Yum Brands Opens First Green KFC-Taco Bell Restaurant

By GreenerBuildings Staff

Created 2009-03-11 14:11

Northampton, Mass. — Restaurant giant Yum Brands Inc. has opened an eco-friendly KFC-Taco Bell in Northampton, Mass., marking the 11-year-old company's first attempt to seek green building certification for one of its eateries.



The restaurant is designed according to environmental goals that include cutting energy and water consumption by 30 percent and reducing CO2 emissions. Operations at the new site are also expected to reduce waste and the amount of rubbish sent to landfills; the restaurant composts and recycles other waste, grease and used cooking oil. The company is seeking certification for the restaurant based on the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environment Design standards.

With some 36,000 KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver's, A&W and Wing Street restaurants in more than 110 countries and territories, Yum Brands Inc. bills itself as the world's largest restaurant company.

The firm issued its first corporate responsibility report last year. And the construction of the KFC-Taco Bell in Northampton is intended as the "first of a series" of projects being pursued by Yum Brands' Building Environmental Sustainability Team as part of the company's Energy Environment and Economics (E3) Initiative, the report says.

The report also says the new restaurant and the initiative make up "the primary exploration vehicle to test and evaluate green building methodologies." Data about the performance of the new restaurant and that of other company sites are expected to inform the Yum Brands' work to green existing buildings, plan prototypes and develop in restaurants.

The new restaurant in Massachusetts has a lighting control system that takes advantage of natural light and uses LED lights inside and out where feasible. The site features energy efficient kitchen and building equipment, rainwater harvesting, a rain garden that serves as filter for storm water and low-flow water fixtures. In addition, the restaurant uses solar energy to preheat fresh air entering building, reducing the need for natural gas.

Yum also said counter tops, insulation and materials used in the building contain recycled content and that wood used in construction was harvested sustainably.
_{Photographs by Derry Berrigan, DBLD Lighting Design, courtesy of Yum Brands} 

• GreenerBuildings
• Architecture & Design
• Energy
• Materials
• Water Use

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Source URL: http://www.greenerbuildings.com/news/2009/03/10/yum-brands-opens-first-green-kfc-taco-bell-restaurant

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ANSI Approves Green Seal for Restaurants

ANSI Approves Green Seal for Restaurants
Posted On September 9, 2009 (8:48 am)
Restaurants seeking to be "green" have another measure of confidence...
Article taken from Environmental Leader - http://www.environmentalleader.com
URL to article: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/09/09/ansi-approves-green-seal-for-restaurants/


For the industry, this seems to be good news! However, are fast foods included in this standard? Fine Dining and Quick-Serve Restaurants have different operating capacities, once, I even heard people in our industry wanting the QSR to have a separate industry classification.  I am so glad to hear that GS-46 follows the specs and guidelines of ISO14024 which follows specifies a comprehensive framework to operations on how to reduce their environmental impacts.

Maybe I'm just disillusioned about my job because most of my superiors don't like dealing with comprehensive frameworks specified by international science-based standards and would rather make their own "egotistical" frameworks. In my studies, I have learned that the environment is not chaotic and we can always find order like in food chains and the order leads to interconnections.

For more information please see Green Seal, Inc.

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Some Thoughts Behind Industry Conferences on "Greening"

I have been attending industry conferences for quite a while and I do agree that such events can influence corporations to change their ways, but change will be a very slow process. I am not sure what goes into the minds of managers who attend these events but deep inside they are still the same people who are just going for the usual bottomline. Stand alone projects such as energy conservation, waste reduction, etc. are useless if they are simply viewed as individual programs because it does not affect a change the overall corporate views of companies.

As an EMS auditor, I would rather focus on Top Management commitment and clarity of environmental policy rather than the number of environmental projects that a company churns out. Green conferences provide a venue for sharing best practices but the focus is more on technologies and projects that a specific company has proven effective within its own context but such fora must also not fail to provide frameworks for companies who are "lost" in integrating such programs into their sustainability agenda.

Oftentimes, this becomes the root of Greenwashing, because companies focus more on promoting specific projects and programs rather than their actual commitment towards sustainable development.  Third party verification to a certain degree is far more  effective than blatant ads in ensuring compliance to regulations and commitment to sustainability. However, current validation criteria is still not a perfect system of validation, reliance on scientific data on the impacts requires continues studies.

Green conferences are a good thing, but it will take a lot more of these to really change how things go about...

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Saving the Earth is a Balancing Act...It Needs A Lot of Thinking Before We Could Judge...

I have been to both sides of the fence, in my early days, I once supported Greenpeace-like civil society groups in their campaigns to eliminate the ills of the environment by eliminating the cause. However, just my luck when my first job was with a business school to do research on how companies can implement environmental management systems. After more than a decade, the business school paradigm did influence my way of thinking but the social action awareness is still there. My problem right now is how do I put the two together.

Stakeholders are important, they can be customers, the government, regulatory agencies or even our Friends of the Earth. Having a voice is important and fast food companies must consider the deeper meaning of their stakeholder's advocacy not just simply please them and give them what they want.  Just like the polystyrene dilemma, in effect, a new problem arose in term of effluent and air quality impacts within the vicinity of a fast food facility. Such is the impact of just simply trying "to please" a stakeholder rather submit themselves on a far more critical environmental due diligence.

Often, we see environmental managers strongly influenced by NGO pressure that they fail to consider that managing environmental impacts is implemented in a strategic framework....I remember a case when a fast food manager agrees to set up an NGO-recommended compost bins for a fast food store without due consideration to the existing HACCP-based food safety management system....well flies swarmed over the burgers...and it became bad for business.

The purpose of civil action is not to be simply pleased for a certain issue, it requires companies to take a more responsible approach in their strategies that environmental management becomes a core organization framework not just simply a fire-fighting PR agenda.

(Photo credits from Greenpeace)

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Saturdays, Beef and the Dilemma of Food Security in the Third World

When I was young we only get beef on Saturdays, that's how it is in developing countries if you source it out from the local market, you can only get beef once a week and most of the time its Saturday and its in limited supply, if you get to the market late well, better settle for pork then or chicken.  In developing countries, it is much easier to become a locavore since what is available to you are simply local stuff.

With economic growth and the affluence that enabled us to have western standards, things have changed, we can get beef anytime of the week in meat shops at groceries and hypermarkets. Cattle raising and beef farming did try its expansion given the demand but it is still cheaper to import....so most of the beef in the frozen section comes from Australia, New Zealand and of course Brazil. With blast freeze technology, we really could not recognize whether that beef came from a top a nearby hill or halfway around the world. Now, we rarely get beef at the local market, maybe once a month but not too often.

It is the need to cheapen things up that expanded the mega-fast-food's supply chain. Producers are trying to do their best to minimize cost and this means externalizing most of it. However, acting on the short-term interest like cheap fast food right now often produces long-term results that nobody really likes.

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Disturbing News from Taco Bell!

Taco Bell's New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

The video from ONN was forwarded by Squidgirl! Its a Taco Bell spoof....some people thought it was real. Its really funny but I found it disturbing because those kinds of  PR guys go around the fast food offices "spin-doctoring" proven scientific research on the impacts of fast food operations. Those PR people made my work life difficult to a certain degree but it made the fast food smell good in the public just like roasted burger with melting cheese on top....yum!

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The Five Stages of Adopting Corporate Sustainability: Yeah Right, We're at Stage 5..woohoo!

The Five Stages of Adopting Corporate Sustainability
Posted On September 2, 2009 (8:14 am)
Adopting sustainability as a goal now will help corporations develop...
Article taken from Environmental Leader - http://www.environmentalleader.com
URL to article: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/09/02/the-five-stages-of-adopting-corporate-sustainability/

The usual Greenwashing firm couldn't care less about the stages of adopting corporate sustainability. I can truly attest to that. Most fast food firms are still stuck in compliance issues which is the core measure of feasible environmental responsibility. Its because profitability is much stronger a driver than responsibility. I think it is the stiff competition that drove most fast food environmental programs to be viewed as a marketing ploy rather than a shift in corporate paradigms. I just hope people   suggesting to the fast food industry to adopt stuff like biodegradable packaging or biodiesel development have to realize that such suggestions would just fall on deaf ears if fast food firms do not have the proper Top Management commitment, organizational infrastructure and comprehensive programs on how they will integrate such suggestions into their environmental management frameworks.

In putting pressure to the fast food, what is essential is to pressure them to change structure not adopt projects like shifting from polystyrene to paper packaging, or getting them to convert used vegetable oil into biodiesel. This will require that civil groups adopt a mindset and skill of a third party auditor make sure that what a Greenwashing firm's commitment to sustainability is indeed at the level in which it is trying to project!

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Starbucks Serves up its First Fairtrade Lattes and Cappuccinos Across the UK and Ireland

Starbucks Serves up its First Fairtrade Lattes and Cappuccinos Across the UK and Ireland

Limited only to UK and Ireland?

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Life Cycle Thinking

In my readings, I came across an old article about a cause I once supported during my college days. I guess I had previously written about it in an earlier post. I once supported a popular civil society group in convincing some big fast food company to switch from polystyrene to reusable wares. It was a victory on our part because gradually, the fast food company's ware did change part of their dine-in customers. However, after a decade, these fast food who once got acclaim for their effort in shifting are now condemned as polluters of our waterways because the cost to clean up their effluents is still not present. The point is we should never look at one thing and think such is a great thing, environmentalists still haven't caught up with life cycle thinking. 


I guess this is my problem being most of the time a consultant more than being an advocate which is every now and then. Sometimes, I just know too much because I have been in both sides of the fence, before lobbying for stricter environmental regulations and working for an industry requesting for a compliance holiday. But the point is what matters is our overall impact.

Ever since we were born, we have always consumed resources. A professor who had passed away a year ago once told us in his lecture that it is much more energy efficient to die than to stay alive, wherever he is, he sure has reached a level of optimum efficiency. Looking at the chicken diagram, well I have eaten so many eggs and so many chicken in my lifetime and that consumption had supported the chicken farms, etc., etc.

Going back to the fast food sector, polystyrene packaging is not the only issue, not only waste water or its impact on the Amazon rain forest since most them outsource their beef from that region. We should know that all fast food corporations are made out of people, not in the "soylent green" sense but in the human resource sense. What drives these people to stick to their guns and continue on their unsustainable path is the way they think and how they see things and the need of their immediate customers. It will be quite a while but the transition is on-going.

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Will Greenwashers Push the Green Movement Back to the Fringe?

Will Greenwashers Push the Green Movement Back to the Fringe?
Posted On May 1, 2007 (10:37 am)
If you want to attract a loyal green consumer, use...
Article taken from Environmental Leader - http://www.environmentalleader.com
URL to article: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2007/05/01/will-greenwashers-push-the-green-movement-back-to-the-fringe/

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The Worst We Could Do Is Isolate Ourselves

In most corporate offices, the environmental department is an enigma, not really, more like sidelined given its relative novelty. Unlike accounting, legal, facilities engineering or purchasing, it is only recently that such units are being put into place when things like environmental compliance issues and safety concerns are being addressed given its legal and economic consequences. While working for the fastfood, people from other departments would ask me what is the purpose of an EHS department? Being new at that time, I was surprised that a lot of old timers were not oriented on the purpose of such group.

More surprised, I found out that our group's decision-making process was not directly linked to anyone at the executive level which in my prior industry affiliation was the usual case. This coming from an industry dominated by ISO14001 certifications where top management commitment is and auditable criteria.

I am validating the article I previously posted were only 12% of the surveyed firms in the United States have executive teams directly involved in sustainability programs, I agree that this is the usual norm not only in Corporate America but in emerging economies. Top management often sets up this units or departments not because of its commitment to the environment but to minimize the risks brought about by environmental compliance issues and stakeholder advocacy on a company's productivity.

If your EHS/CSR group is stuck in that situation, the worst you can do is isolate yourselves. By isolating and even stigmatizing such groups, the environmental concern becomes less mainstream within an organization. Having our jobs does not make us special as if we are mystical beings. I have always cautioned that an environmental management program must be rationalized not mysticized, because turning it into a somewhat spiritual  experience does not allow it to have the proper organizational infrastructure it needs to become mainstream where only a few in the organization could understand it and even appreciate your groups existence. It is becoming  more of a fad and not an essential part in the growth of an organization. If you are in a dead-locked situation, where top management does not even recognize the purpose of your presence in the office when they see you, again the worse you can do is try to make an impression.  It would be a lot better to make sure that everyone including your janitor and photocopy guy knows and appreciates what you are doing. By developing the lower ranks of the hierarchy, the change necessary can reach the top, noting from the book Thinking in Systems, the purpose of the hierarchy is to fulfill the needs of those in the bottom.

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Only 12% of Major Firms have Executive Team for Sustainability

Only 12% of Major Firms have Executive Team for Sustainability
Posted On August 27, 2009 (6:48 am)
Many large corporations are merely paying lip service to their...
Article taken from Environmental Leader - http://www.environmentalleader.com
URL to article: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/08/27/only-12-of-major-firms-have-executive-team-for-sustainability/

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