They want your grease

After a successful trial in the Netherlands, hamburger chain McDonalds will power all its UK delivery trucks with cooking oil by the year end. The 155 trucks will run on biodiesel made entirely from used oil collected from the burger bars.

The UK trucks will initially use a blend of 85 per cent biodiesel and 15 per cent rapeseed oil. The move is further evidence of the long-lasting effect of the anti-McDonalds campaign a decade ago. Many of the leaders of that group are now living off-grid in Steward Wood, Devon.

A year ago, after a sustained campaign by Greenpeace, McDonald’s agreed to stop using soya from newly deforested land in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. This year, it started selling coffee certified by the Rainforest Alliance in its UK restaurants, a move that it says boosted sales by 10 per cent, as their old coffee tasted so foul.

Matthew Howe, manager of McDonald’s UK supply chain, told the Financial Times that the cost of using biodiesel was expected to be the same as the restaurant group’s diesel costs in the long term. “In the short term, we think it will cost a little bit more,” he said, adding this extra cost could amount to “a couple of pennies a litre”.

The company expects to convert an annual 6m litres of oil, comparable to the 6.1m litres of diesel used in its trucks last year.

It will collect oil from 900 of its 1,200 UK outlets each week, take it to a separation tank in East Anglia, where food particles will be removed, and then on to a biodiesel conversion plant in Milton Keynes in central England.

McDonald’s could not say whether the vehicles involved in moving the oil around the UK would be fuelled by biodiesel themselves, but the company said the net effect of the scheme would be a 78 per cent reduction in its carbon emissions.

Francesca DeBiase, McDonald’s chief supply chain officer said the group’s European operation was an “early warning system” for the US.