McDonald’s Germany encourages teenagers and young adults to help make the cities and towns clean. In its new anti-littering campaign, launched in May ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2010, the global fast-food chain is asking young residents of urban areas not to throw litter around. The new campaign called “Gib Müll eine Abfuhr!” (“Remove the Trash”) invites youth to ‘score’ their goals with a ball made of used crumpled packaging.

«We take the issue of waste on an even more serious level,» stated the McDonald’s Germany vice-president Holger Beeck in the city of Cologne, where the campaign was started. «In the restaurants, we have already achieved a recycling rate of 90 percent. We will now focus even more strongly on minimizing the amount of packaging thrown around the venues. »

According to a survey conducted by the Society for Consumer Research for McDonald’s, young adults litter streets more often than representatives of other age groups. Twenty percent of the 14-29 year old Germans, who took part in the poll, admitted they have thrown used packaging on the ground (in other age groups on the average 1 of 10 people ignore street trashcans from time to time).