McDonald’s has been hit with a penalty notice in the Netherlands and has been told to stop serving disposable cups for customers dining in.
The order came after environmental NGO Fair Resource Foundation filed an enforcement request with the country’s regulator, the Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate (ILT), alleging breaches of a rule in force since January 2024.
The rule in question dictates that Dutch hospitality businesses must serve dine-in food and drinks in reusable packaging unless the packaging is made from high-quality recycled and recyclable PET. The point was to cut down on single-use plastic and nudge the whole sector toward reuse.
A failing reuse system
Back in December 2025, the Fair Resource Foundation laid out its case, saying that McDonald’s was still putting drinks and McFlurry ice creams in single-use cardboard cups with a plastic coating and, to top that, the chain was charging a €0.15 surcharge per cup. This wasn’t just non-compliance, the NGO argued. It was a revenue model built around packaging that’s supposed to be banned.
The sharper accusation went a bit further. McDonald’s, it claimed, was deliberately letting its own reuse system fail while also lobbying against the rules that would fix it.
On this point, the Foundation’s evidence came from McDonald’s own impact report, which shows that reusable cups at McDonald’s Netherlands get used only 3.3 times on average before they end up in the trash.
The ILT looked into the complaint and backed it up. Across dozens of visits to McDonald’s restaurants, inspectors flagged multiple violations and responded with a penalty order.
Now the chain has a deadline. It must serve reusable packaging in its restaurants from January 5, 2027, or face fines of €625,000 a week, up to a maximum of €3,750,000. This ceiling isn’t random either. The Fair Resource Foundation says it was calculated from the profit McDonald’s made off its disposable cup surcharge.
“McDonald’s is a symbol of the throwaway economy,” said Chloé Schwizgebel, a project coordinator at the Fair Resource Foundation, in a statement. “Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of it.”
She added that McDonald’s carries weight well beyond its own stores. “As the market leader with over 3 million customers per week, which has a significant influence on the rest of the market, its environmental impact extends beyond that of its own company.”
Schwizgebel’s one caveat was about timing. This should have happened more than two years ago, she noted, and the switch still hasn’t shown up in practice.
McDonald’s Netherlands, which now has until January 5 to comply, pushed back in its response, arguing it’s actually working toward the same goal. “The government and McDonald’s share the same goal: less plastic and demonstrable environmental gains,” the company said in a statement, adding that it believes it’s following the underlying principles of the single-use plastics legislation and supports the law’s objective.
Sources: Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate, Fair Resource Foundation, McDonald’s, Rijksoverheid, European Union, Packaging Europe