The croation burger equation

golddustmedia

Here at work we've made an interesting discovery involving Croatia, big macs and daylight savings time!

It goes like this...

My colleague mentioned an upcoming change of the daylight savings time date in the USA which seems likely to cause confusion.

Understandably I asked "Why would they change the date on which they put the clocks back?".

The answer, "it's supposed to save a lot of energy on lighting or something".

"What would the Americans know about saving energy!?" I said "If they all just ate one less McDonalds a year they'd probably save enough energy to power Croatia for a year!".

Well that perked our interest....

Some calculations later:
An American Big Mac meal (large) with a choc milkshake and 2 sachets of ketchup for the fries contains 1910 calories.... which is 7991.44 Joules of energy. Multiply this by the 298 Million people in America and you get a really big number. Then we took into account a multiplier of factor 10 to allow for the extra energy used in cultivating the raw food materials, processing them into fast food, production of the packaging materials, delivery of food and packaging to the restaurant and finally to cook the food. We felt it was a reasonably conservative estimate to say that 9 times the energy contained in the food was used in the rest of the process, hence the multiple 10 factor.

Then we set about comparing this to the annual energy requirements of Croatia which we found to be 11.5 TerraWatthours. (TWh).

Astonishingly we calculated that if every American DID NOT eat just one large Big Mac meal with chocolate milkshake each year then the energy saved would provide 51% of Croatia ANNUAL energy requirements.

In other words if twice a year every American didn't go to McDonalds the saving would power an entire country for a year!


Having worked all this out I feel it's my duty to tell the world!
Dave@Toolstation.

EDIT; (Rather scarily this is totally serious, we really did work this out and that really is the potential energy saving!)

tripled

Interesting theory, not the most scientific I've ever read but still. I like the conclusion that if Americans ate two less Big Macs a year you could power Ukraine

Cardew

So all you need to invent is something that converts Big Macs into useful power.

Won't be an Internal Combustion engine I fear.

Whilst Macdonald's finest are known to produce flatulance, I don't think wind power will work either.

You could of course work the equation in reverse. There is enough power from the sun, wind and waves to produce the energy equivalent of 4.7 trillion Big Macs for every person in the USA; and still be able to power Croatia.

Harnessing that power might be a problem; but easily solved in the pub.

tripled

Cardew wrote: »

Won't be an Internal Combustion engine I fear.

So had I better take the Bacon McDouble with cheese back out my petrol tank?