Welsh Company Helps McDonald’s Happy Meals become Eco-Friendlier
McDonald’s is one of the latest companies to announce they plan to stop using single use plastics in their restaurants and are turning to a Welsh company to help them achieve this
McDonald’s have joined other high street chains such as Costa Coffee, Wetherspoons and Pizza Express with their plan to phase out plastic straws in favour of an eco-friendlier biodegradable paper straw. Currently McDonald’s use around 1.8 million plastic straws a day in the UK and have just announced that as of September, this year they will be replacing them with paper alternatives in all of their 1,361 restaurants in UK and Ireland.
To be able to achieve this McDonald’s will be using two suppliers, one is a company in Belfast and the other is a Welsh company called Transcend Packaging which is a small company based in Ebbw Vale, who only employs 20 members of staff at the minute, but plans to increase this to around 200 by 2019 as they think they will need 20 machines to fulfil demands in producing these new straws which use paper from certified sustainable sources.
Amazingly, no paper straws have been made in Britain for the last several decades, but our Welsh factory is changing that and as the dangers of plastics on marine life is becoming more known even though paper straws are more expensive to produce than plastic ones hopefully more and more companies like McDonalds will decide to make the change as well.
