There’s much more to fast food joints than piping hot, low-priced, quick-fix snacks. For instance, ‘grab and go’, fast food joints with their griddles and deep fat fryers, generate much more pollution than cars and buses. Officials of the state Pollution Control Board, who, till now have been focusing on traffic and other sources of pollution, are now training their gaze on fast food joints, both large and small, including ‘takeaways’.
This encompasses food joints which have sprung up in residential as well as commercial areas. The snag, however, is that in the absence of any regulations and due to these joints outnumbering the officials required to tackle violations; such complaints will be addressed on a ‘case-to- case’ basis. Officials also revealed that such restaurants contribute significantly towards smog build-up. APPCB is constantly being approached with complaints against fast food centres like the ones around Hyderabad-2 bus depot, Durganagar and Dilsukhnagar. “Of late, a lot of such joints have come up in residential and public places,” said an official. He said that volatile organic compounds and those generated due to burning of fat or oil on the premises produced serious air pollutants.