In Australia, parents have just been subjected to a battle of plastic toys between top supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths. Coles’ Little Supermarket collectibles shook off a petition to have it shut down. Woolworths then offered a recycling service for its collectible Lion King Ooshies. Woolworths launched an environmentally-friendly, collectibles promotion immediately after, which is still running. The Woolworths Discovery Garden is a collection of tiny pot plant seedlings – herbs and veges for children to grow.
In the UK, Burger King has taken a more direct approach to dealing with the plastic toy menace that children’s gift with purchase promotions have been causing for years. It’s asking kids to melt down all of their plastic meal toys for recycling.
The initiative, dreamed up by agency, Jones Knowles Ritchie, is called The Meltdown, and accompanies a pledge by Burger King to remove all toys from the chain’s Junior Meals, removing 320 tonnes of plastic waste annually. Naturally, the partners have to remove the desire to be given plastic toys first.
The Meltdown is inviting children to bring their old meal toys from any fast food chain to its restaurants so that they can be melted down and recycled. Plastic toy amnesty bins are being set up at Burger King’s 500+ restaurants in the UK. Burger King is rewarding those who do relinquish their toys between September 19 and 30 with free King Junior Meals, sticker sheets and Meltdown BK crowns when mum or dad also buys an adult meal.
The campaign is being promoted in digital, out-of-home, in-store and experiential advertising.
https://youtu.be/bb-6llE2IW0
It is not the first time the idea has been put forward. Late last year, McDonald’s Japan asked customers to bring in the kids’ toys that are not being used or played with anymore so that they could be upcycled into restaurant food trays. By mid-November, the company said that it had collected more than one million toys that were used to make around 100,000 trays.
It would seem, though, that the Jones Knowles Ritchie idea was triggered by a Change.org petition in the UK, created by young siblings, Ella and Caitlin McEwen, aged 9 and 7. The sisters began their petition in June, asking both McDonald’s and Burger King to remove plastic toys from their kids’ meals. The petition has received more than 500,000 signatures. McDonald’s promised to significantly reduce its hard plastic toys in July and replace them with more sustainable options in the second half of the year. Ella and Caitlin had a meeting with the chief executive officer of McDonalds UK this week. McDonald’s UK has no plans to scrap its toy giveaways, instead offering its customers the option of swapping the toy for a sachet of fruit if they wish, and next year a book. It is, however, replacing plastic straws with paper ones in its UK restaurants, removing McFlurry plastic lids and single-use plastic from McDonald’s salads. This, the chain stated, would remove 1,005 metric tonnes of plastic annually.
