McDonald’s – Siyi Zhao – 2025

Summary

Maggie Zhao organized carbon accounting benchmark documents, provided recommendations tailored to McDonald’s operational context, and carried out energy conservation and carbon reduction-related calculations.

Goals

McDonald’s is promoting a series of energy conservation and emission reduction initiatives to build a green restaurant image. McDonald’s China engaged Maggie Zhao to assist in the development of a carbon accounting benchmark by providing suggestions aligned with McDonald’s operations and supporting the company’s energy conservation and carbon reduction projects, participating in related calculation and assessment work. Combining theory and practice to promote McDonald’s green progress.

Solutions

In addition to the standard documents retrieved, McDonald’s also provided Maggie Zhao with other useful documents and standards that they frequently use. After in-depth review and collaborative discussions with company staff, Maggie combined McDonald’s actual business characteristics with related regulations and standards, offering relevant suggestions and laying a methodological foundation for future carbon reduction work. Through reading building standard documents and communicating with suppliers and mentors, she confirmed the formula for calculating the energy consumption of building materials. Then, she packaged the formula into an app for quick calculation and expanded use. After learning about the development of refrigerants and compiling the carbon emissions composition of refrigerants, she calculated the carbon reduction of McDonald’s replacement plan.

Potential Impact

The benchmark-related suggestions, tailored to McDonald’s actual operations and relevant standards, can serve as a methodological reference for future carbon calculations and carbon reduction projects. At the same time, expanding energy-saving calculation tools can help McDonald’s sort out its building materials database and comprehensively manage green building materials. All of those can promote the implementation of McDonald’s energy conservation and carbon reduction initiatives.