Waste Diversion Elevated Enviro Ratings:

McDonald’s Happy Meal Toy

Elevated Enviro rates everyday products based on how much of it can be diverted from landfills after use, waste diversion. We look at products through reduce, reuse and recycle. Let’s see how the Happy Meal Toy does...

The toy comes wrapped in a plastic bag. Like many other products we do not know the grade or quality of this plastic. Knowing the grade is important as different grades have different markets. Our recyclables tend to go to a sorting facility first. If they don’t know what grade it is they can’t put it in the correct line to be processed, it gets landfilled instead. Each part of the toy comes in this type of plastic bag.

The main part of the toy has a plastic brace on it. We actually know what grade of plastic this is, #1 PET. This is the same kind of plastic that our pop or soda bottles are made out of. However, the equipment to sort and process bottles is different then these small plastic items. The plastic grade isn’t very obvious either. If it were more obvious, we as consumers and those as sorters would be able to tell if it could be recycled, then the right equipment could be deployed at our sorting facilities.

The toy can be donated after use but it can not be recycled as we do not know what grade or quality of plastic it is made out of. 

We give McDonald’s Happy Meal Toy a 1.8 out of 5.