Dear McDonald’s: No more plastic toys, please
Happy Meals’ special treats are giving kids the wrong idea about our disposable society
My daughter is now finally old enough that she no longer insists, to the point of tears, on getting a toy — usually a plastic action figure wrapped in plastic — with her McDonald’s Happy Meal.
I’d like to think that my frequent comments about how “something that you use for just five minutes shouldn’t be polluting the environment when you’re an old woman” have finally sunk in. But I suspect it was my wife’s insistence that she had to clean up or get rid of all of the unused tschotskes in her bedroom. There’s nothing my daughter likes less than cleaning her room.
No parent should have to put up with a decade of that aggravation, nor should the planet. That’s why it’s good news that some fast-food restaurants are thinking seriously about ending the practice of giving out plastic toys along with their kids meals.
Burger King recently announced it would melt down its inventory of plastic toys in England and turn them into playground equipment and tray tables. They’ve pledged to phase out non-compostable toys worldwide by 2025.
The churlish side of me might ask “why wait until 2025?” But I’ll give Burger King a bit of a pass for now, especially when they’re doing a lot more than their arch-competitor, McDonald’s (offering the no-meat “Impossible Burger” also wins them some green brownie points).
For its part, in Britain, Mickey D’s has tested offering kids a choice between a toy and a piece of fruit or, starting next year, a book. That might be a great way to identify the ecology-, health- and literature-loving children among our youth. But I know what my daughter would — until recently — have picked. Let’s just say that she and most of her friends wouldn’t be lessening landfills’ intakes.
They’ve been exploring what to do for a long time. There have been calls to ban toy giveaways since the 1980s, though usually as a way to combat child obesity. Nearly four decades later, they’ve managed to beat back all of those appeals. But maybe with all of the negative publicity around plastic straws, single-use plastic bags, and now plastic toys, McD’s will be willing to change its ways.
Of course, plastic toys make up only an infinitesimal fraction of the plastic pollution problem. But no longer including them in Happy Meals will send a wonderful message to kids — one that they’ll remember for a long time.
However, until McDonald’s sends that message, they have earned the November 2019 Thneed Trophy, for foisting on our children something they all love now, but which they won’t be happy cleaning up decades from now.
The Thneed Trophy is awarded monthly by Environmental Action to a product that exemplifies the spirit of The Lorax’s “thneed”. It’s the thing that everyone wants but nobody needs, for which all of the Truffula Trees were cut down. In other words, bad for the environment, with little or no redeeming social value.
This message is not associated with or endorsed by the creators or the publishers of “The Lorax.”
