One of the best parts of summer is late-night runs to McDonald’s with your best friends. While we all are aware that weekends full of midnight Big Macs aren't the healthiest choice for our bodies, you might not know how your fast-food choices impact the health of our environment. Here are some easy ways to ensure that your next fast food craving doesn't damage our planet!
1. Ditch the Plastic Lid and Straw
This may seem minor and like an unnecessary inconvenience, but plastic pollution is a huge climate issue. Americans used an estimated 500 million straws every day, and plastic straws and lids are among the top 10 items found during coastal cleanups. By choosing to not use a plastic straw and lid, you help keep our oceans cleaner and our marine animals safer.
2. Skip the Cheese
Producing a pound of cheese can produce 11 pounds of carbon dioxide or more, so opting for no-cheese will help reduce our carbon emissions, which are a known contributor to global climate change. Plus, this will help reduce your caloric intake!
3. Take Home Your Leftovers
Food waste in landfills produces a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. By taking home your leftover food, or using it in another useful way (by giving it to someone else, composting it, etc.), you will help reduce the amount of methane produced by discarded food in landfills and ensure that the energy spent cooking your food will not go to waste.
4. Recycle!
Many products from McDonald's can be recycled. The only catch is that if they are food-soiled, meaning that they have touched a food, they cannot be recycled. If you have any leftover straws, straw packaging (the white paper packaging), plastic cups, plastic cup covers, unused napkins, or non-greasy plastic bags that you were planning on throwing away, you can most likely recycle them! Be sure to read up on rules regarding recycling and what types of plastics your local plants process to be sure all of your leftover products can be recycled properly; a quick Google search of your city and recycling rules should yield some relevant information.
5. Eat Less Meat
This may sound ridiculous, as we are talking about McDonald's, but industrially-farmed meat requires a lot of energy to produce, and eating less of it will help reduce your personal carbon footprint. This doesn't mean that you have to say goodbye to Big Macs for good, but if you're ever stuck deciding between a burger or a milkshake with fries, go with the milkshake and fries.
All of these may seem like small things that won't really make a difference, but the reality is that small changes like these add up to make a huge impact on our planet. If we all make a conscious effort to make some of our choices more eco-friendly, we can pave the way to a cleaner, healthier future for our planet.
