I love McDonalds. It’s a vice that is occasionally embraced though not nearly enough as my taste buds want. Look for a future recipe on vegetarian Big Macs. Sounds disgusting but it’s amazing and easy.
It’s been said that in the US alone, more than 220 million Happy Meals are sold annually, each of them including with some shit toy that will invariably hit the garbage heap within 3 days. Let’s look at the numbers:
- Estimate that 95% of the happy meals include a toy. You can pick a book, but when it comes down to it, the book is there to make you feel good about buying a meal. You’ll still pick the toy though. This leave us with 209 million toys.
- Let’s assume that, on average, each toy contains 2 oz of plastic. this leaves us with 418 million ounces of plastic.
- To make old-school legos, it takes a ratio of 2 units of oil to make 1 unit of plastic. Let’s assume that the average toy above uses the same ratio. The estimated oil tally is 836 million ounces of oil. This is equivalent to about 155,506 barrels of oil.
- This doesn’t include the wasted fuel used for transporting the fuel from the source to a refinery, to the plastic factory, to the moulding factory (likely in China), then off to America, and finally to the franchise where little Billy chomps on his nuggets. I’m not even going to go try to measure this.
These numbers need a lot of leeway/forgiveness but the point is that these tiny toys may seem cute and inconsequential, but have a huge aggregate imprint on waste. It’s not just Ronald either. Many other food entities use toys to entice children to visit and eat. Think of all the junk at dollar stores that get broken after a single use.
You can make a difference as well. Stop buying junk. Take the book instead.