Nice revenue model
Last week I was eating at McDonald’s. As I sucked my strawberry milkshake through my cardboard straw and saw that the plastic lid had finally been removed from my cup, my eye fell on the receipt. 15 cent surcharge for the disposable cup, 5 cent surcharge for the plastic cup of the fries sauce. Of course, as of July 1, 2023, new rules have come into effect. Companies are no longer allowed to give away disposable plastic cups and containers for free. Yes, I thought, another step in the right direction. But, ‘not free’ means that they just have to charge you for it. And that is of course quite a nice revenue model. Because what would be the purchase value of a cup for McDonald’s? At most 5 cents. That would mean that 10 cents are now earned on every disposable cup. Multiply that by the 100 million cups that McDonald’s sells in the Netherlands every year and you have a profit of around 10 million euros. It would be nice if that money were invested in truly sustainable innovations…
Anyway, that 15 cent surcharge is of course intended to persuade the consumer to opt for the deposit variant. Something that is not yet possible with the fritessauce containers. Although I wonder whether the average McDonald’s guest, who orders a large bigmac menu and 9 chicken nuggets for about 10 euros – after all, the average McDonald’s customer does not order a McPlant, and the veggie McNuggets are already out of the range – will feel that Influencing 15 cents to make a sustainable choice, it is of course a step in the right direction. However, these kind of silly measures raise the question in my mind whether we actually realize what we are doing it for.
The enthusiastic CSR manager
I regularly speak to directors, board members and entrepreneurs, and ask them how they view sustainability and to what extent they are working on it within their company. The answer I get the most is “we have at least one electric car in our fleet, that’s my Tesla, ha-ha”. Sometimes there are already solar panels on the roof and in some cases they have even appointed a CSR manager. That CSR manager, however, gets little more than that nice title. No team, no mandate. This CSR manager can write a nice text for under the heading ‘CSR policy’ on the website and maybe even abolish the plastic stirrers or put a waste separation bin in the office. Sustainability is still seen as something vague, something left-wing or unnecessary and expensive. New silly measures are devised, sometimes with the best of intentions, without realizing what sustainability really means.
When will the realization come that we are doing this to pass on the earth to future generations? When will the realization come that that future generation has already been born and when will the realization come that that is also your son or daughter? We are not going to save the world with silly measures such as a 15 cent surcharge on plastic and the abolition of stirrers. In a few years your children will ask you what you have done to keep the earth livable. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that it was more than just paying your plastic surcharge at McDonald’s?