Challenges and opportunities
As a business, we continue to grow. The challenge lies in balancing our interest in minimizing our impacts as we expand menu offerings and operating hours in many of our markets. Still, we see plenty of solid business opportunities. In today’s world, environmental conservation goes hand-in-hand with fiscal responsibility and cost efficiency. For example, the two largest environmental impacts of our restaurant operations are energy use and waste generation. If we can reduce these impacts, we will benefit from reduced operating costs.
Our decentralization is a real strength as well. Individual restaurants, franchisees, suppliers and company staff continue to experiment with and test some very innovative environmental initiatives - from “no straw” day in Korea to solar panels in Germany. We can see what works and scale successful programs efficiently throughout our System.
Goals (2008-2010)
1. Continue to find ways to maximize energy efficiency in our restaurants
- Continue to partner with markets to test, evaluate, and implement new technologies for continuous improvement of our energy efficient building standards.
Improve the measurement and tracking of the energy performance of our existing restaurants.
2. Continue to integrate environmental considerations into our packaging design through rollout of our global packaging scorecard into our nine largest markets.
3. Increase best practice sharing within our System to enhance the transfer and scaling of the most efficient and innovative initiatives.
4. Further rollout our global forestry standards for consumer packaging, expanding into other Areas of the World, specifically the U.S. and Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (APMEA).
