McDonald's is hungry for sustainable beef

McDonald’s says it will begin buying sustainable beef in 2016 with the goal of someday having all of its beef come from verified sustainable sources.

The Oak Brook fast-food giant lays out its plan and the challenges here.

Businessweek.com said it “is an ambitious goal for lots of reasons, not least of which is the absence of any standard for just what makes beef — a very resource-intense protein — sustainable.”

“We have achieved internal alignment and energy around that aspirational goal, which is a big task,” Bob Langert, McDonald’s vice president for global sustainability, told Greenbiz.com.