McDonalds opens electric car charging restaurant

Fast food giant McDonald's has announced it is to open a "green" outlet in North Carolina next week, with a new twist: it will be the first such restaurant in the McDonald's chain to offer electric car charging.

The building, which opens in the town of Cary, will feature electric vehicle charging stations from provided by Columb Technologies.

The company's ChargePoint stations work using either a card system for subscribers, or enable drivers to pay for a single charging session by placing a toll-free call. They operate in in a wireless mesh network managed by a single gateway charting station.

The charging stations are just one of a number of green innovations employed at the new restaurant.

The building will include low energy LED lighting fixtures, as well as solar tubes designed to pipe natural light into the restaurant more effectively.

It will also use sunflower seed board and bamboo for some of its fittings, and will be certified under the US Green Building Council's LEED standard, as part of its LEED for Retail pilot programme.

The new Cary site is the first McDonald's restaurant to feature electric car chargers, and is part of a wider strategy to cut the environmental impact of the company's facilities.

According to its recent corporate social responsibility report, the company opened a "green" restaurant in Chicago last August boasting a vegetated "living roof" and is also working on " green" restaurants in Brazil, Canada, and France to be opened later this year.