Seda and McDonald's launch new Eco Fit Lid in Italy

This December, all McDonald's restaurants in Italy started using Seda’s Eco Fit Lid made from 100% PEFC™ certified fibres, marking an important new milestone in our twenty-year partnership.

The move was announced during the final stop of the McDonald’s Sustainability Roadshow 2022, organised with Comieco and Seda to map a path to the ecological transition and circular economy together.

The fully-recyclable Eco Fit Lid is set to replace current plastic lids for hot & cold beverage cups in the food service market, saving tons of CO2 emissions and plastic waste. McDonald's alone is replacing over 140 million plastic lids with Eco-Fit in its restaurants, including McDrive and McDelivery, with a consequent saving of 250 metric tons of plastic per year.

The Eco Fit Lid's innovative design and sustainable raw materials have been widely acclaimed, including through winning the 2020 European Carton Excellence Awards in the Save the Planet category and the 2022 Best Packaging Award.

Setting it apart, the Eco Fit Lid offers higher safety standards than other fibre-based solutions thanks to its tight fit, enhanced by an audible snap, and the fact that it doesn’t absorb liquids, grow softer or lose functionality in use.

These innovations will help McDonald’s reach 100% recycling of the single-use paper packaging in all its restaurants, setting an international best practice standard and demonstrating its achievability in closed environments.

The science has already established that recycling single-use paper packaging has significantly better environmental impacts than using reusable alternatives. Recent certified European studies have shown substantially lower energy consumption, resulting in three times less CO2 emissions, and dramatically lower freshwater usage – up to 300 times less with 100% recycling!