KANSAS CITY, Mo. – McDonald’s Canada recently announced the launch of its Green Concept Restaurants in Vancouver and British Columbia. These restaurants basically are testing sites for a variety of sustainable packaging and utensil solutions.

Customers visiting these special stores will see paper straws, and wooden cutlery and stir sticks. Cold drinks, specifically medium-size ones, will be served in cups that are acceptable in recycling streams.

The Green Concept Restaurant is one in a series of measures McDonald’s has taken to reduce their restaurants’ environmental footprint. But how did McDonald’s get to this point in the first place? To find out, MEAT+POULTRY spoke with Bob Langert, a former McDonald’s vice president over sustainability initiatives and author of The Battle To Do Good: Inside McDonald’s Sustainability Journey.

McDonald’s battle to do good included external and internal skirmishes because, “…getting anything done in a business is hard as anything, and when it comes to sustainability, almost all the issues that I worked on for almost three decades — they’re all new things — implementing a new animal welfare program or fund new packaging policies. So, as you know, human nature when we start something new it’s always a challenge.”