McDonald’s
While the french fry giant has done its share of pandering to eco-conscious customers for Earth Day throughout the years, this vintage play set of plastic shovels, bird feeders, terrariums, and binoculars made for Earth Day in 1993 really triggered my nostalgia. The play set’saccompanying activity booklet has a simple message emblazoned across the top: “PLEASE PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE.”
There’s a particular irony in mass-producing plastic toys, all which came wrapped in single-use plastic, for a holiday to celebrate the planet. These were distributed out the drive-through window in the early 90s, when oil and plastic companies were still successfully convincing the public that recycling works and that garbage is wholly our responsibility, not theirs. A simpler time! Of course, global plastic production has since shot up from 137 million tonnes in 1993 to 381 million tonnes in 2015.
McDonald’s announced in 2021 that it would phase out plastic toys in all its Happy Meals, with the goal of completing the global overhaul by 2025. Apparently, the company said, this change alone will be the equivalent of 650,000 people not using plastic for a year. So, uh, they were producing a lot of plastic in the intervening decades between when this playset was birthed into existence and now.
