Willemstad, March 2019. On Saturday, March 30th, from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., McDonald’s will be joining the Earth’s Hour for 10 year in a row, turning off non-essential lights in all its restaurants across Latin America and the Caribbean, including the McDonald’s restaurants in Curacao. To add some excitement to this hour we will have a one hour show with fire artists and drums at the McDonald’s Sta. Maria parkinglot.

Arcos Dorados, the world’s largest independent McDonald’s franchisee operating the largest quick service restaurant (“QSR”) chain in Latin America and the Caribbean, has been partnering for a decade with WWF’s Earth Hour; to reduce its environmental impact and leverage its scale to create awareness about the most urgent environmental challenges for our planet.

The Earth Hour is a global campaign, which started in 2007 as a symbolic light out event in Sydney, Australia. Now it’s the world's largest grassroots movement for the environment, inspiring millions of people to take action on reducing consumption of natural resources by turning off lights for an hour.

“For us the Earth Hour is an opportunity to create awareness in our customers about the importance to use responsibly our planet’s resources. At McDonald’s we are committed with a more sustainable operation and that is why we’re implementing different initiatives to reduce our impact on the environment”. Said Jennifer Poulina, market manager for McDonald’s Curacao.

This action takes place under the “Recipe for the Future” initiative, which also involves sustainable packaging, recycling and actions to curb climate change, among others. Actually McDonald’s Curacao has made big progress when it comes to suistainabilty. Currently, 90% of paper packaging comes from renewable sources. In addition, 4 restaurants in Curacao, have implemented the “Natal Program”, which seeks to reduce the consumption of drinking water and energy in the restaurants by reusing condensed water generated by the air conditioners.