Burger King UK Will No Longer Give Away Plastic Promotional Toys, Will Collect Old Toys to Melt and Recycle

Brendan Menapace

If you managed to convince your mom or dad to take you to Burger King or McDonald’s, one of the highlights of the trip was the excitement of getting a little toy. They were never that fancy, but even at a young age, we understood the excitement of something for free. But what we didn’t understand at that age was the impact these disposable and often shoddily constructed promotional toys had on the planet. We usually played with them for a few days, maybe a month at most, and then they ended up in a landfill somewhere.

Thankfully, two kids in the U.K. have a better understanding of people’s wasteful habits than we did back then.

Ella and Caitlin McEwan, age 9 and 7 respectively, started a petition asking companies to “think of the environment and stop giving plastic toys with their kids meals.” The petition has more than half a million signatures, per the BBC, and Burger King has agreed to stop giving away plastic toys in the U.K.

Taking things a step further, Burger King encouraged customers to bring in old toys they received so they can melt them down to make other items like trays and playground equipment. The polymers used to make the toys can be cut into smaller pellets and used to create other plastic items.

“If we were to use recycled polypropylene to make a tray, instead of new plastic, total energy consumption would be reduced by approximately 88 percent, and carbon emissions would be cut by approximately 70 percent,” Johann Boedecker, CEO of Pentatonic, a manufacturer of consumer goods using recycled materials, told the BBC.

Look, the McEwan sisters aren’t anti-toy. They’re kids, for crying out loud! Of course they’re not anti-toy. But they understand that you can create toys with more environmentally-friendly materials, and don’t want to grow up in a world where they’re swimming with trash or their playground is next to a giant landfill.

“We started thinking about the environment when we were [studying it] at school,” Ella McEwan told the BBC. “I like to eat at McDonald’s and Burger King sometimes, but I don’t like the toys—they’re really bad for the environment.”

McDonald’s is also in on it, to an extent. The company said it wouldn’t stop giving out toys completely in the U.K. like it’s flame-broiled competitor, but would give customers the option of swapping fruit for the usual Happy Meal toy.

“The gifts provide fun for many families and children,” Paul Pomroy, CEO of McDonald’s U.K. and Ireland, told the BBC. “That’s why we’ll be running these trials, in order to give our customers a choice. They can also choose not to have a toy or gift at all.”

Burger King, which said it plans to take “significant” action to address the issue of waste, will put bins in its restaurants to collect old toys, saving more than an estimated 700,000 lbs. of plastic each year.

“I expected we’d get maybe a couple hundred signatures from our friends,” Craig McEwan, the girls’ father, said. “And in the first week or so we did get about 1,000, but then it suddenly went viral and started shooting up.”

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