Belgian design studio WeWantMore has collaborated with McDonald’s on a circular design pilot program for the global fast-food chain’s locations in France and Belgium. The decor for the restaurants was designed for disassembly using mechanical fixings instead of glue, so local teams can more effectively break down the features by raw material type to streamline reuse and recycling. Courtesy WeWantMore

McDonald’s Reimagines its Interiors through Radical Circular Design

A pilot program launching in McDonald’s France and Belgium aims to create sustainable interior renovations for the global fast-food brand. 

At Belgium’s inaugural McDonald’s in Beurs is a bronze wall plaque that states the year it was founded: 1978, the same decade the oil crisis brought into question the reliance on plastics in manufacturing furnishings. After a recent refurbishment, however, few other signs of the ’70s remain, as McDonald’s is looking beyond its brown mansard roofs of the past toward a more ecologically conscious future. 

The Beurs branch follows in the footsteps of two earlier circular pilot projects in France, designed by Antwerp-based studio WeWantMore, helmed by Ruud Belmans and Thomas Vanden Abeele. WeWantMore’s multidisciplinary approach, working both as interior designers and as brand consultants, allowed the team to integrate McDonald’s global identity with cutting-edge sustainability practices developed by the firm’s materials research team. 

Each location is anchored by a partition wall made of energy-efficient LED tubes, representing the “kind of energy that you get from a sunny day,” says WeWantMore creative director Ruud Belmans.
One hundred percent of the plastic used in stools and chairs is made from recycled content, and the tables feature Polygood tabletops made from 100 percent recycled and recyclable plastic by The Good Plastic Company.

Creating a New Framework for Life Cycle Analysis (LCA)

The life cycle of the project’s interior furnishings and surfaces was measured and tracked through an index created by ecological sustainability consultancy Anthesis. The design strategies consist of easy-to-disassemble furnishings that lack powder coating and laminates that make materials notoriously hard to recycle. Assembled with mechanical fixings rather than glue, the items can be easily deconstructed by local crews and reused as raw materials. Recycled coffee grounds are used for the tabletops for the tables at the McCafé. One hundred percent of the plastic used in tabletops and stools is made from recycled content, as well as all of the plastic used in the restaurant’s chairs. Eighty percent of the wood used in the restaurant is PEFC certified, and the floor and ceilings are Cradle to Cradle certified. One goal of this experiment is for McDonald’s to eventually create a “take-back” program with materials suppliers. 

One challenge that WeWantMore faced in the design process was the issue of durability. They experimented with resilient elements like the scratch-resistant tabletops that protect the tables’ surface and color from damage by food trays and daily cleaning agents. “All of these materials have to go through all of the heavy testing that McDonald’s does,” says Belmans. 

Despite an intentionality in letting the materials speak for themselves as sustainable, this eco-friendliness is not all in-your-face. “We didn’t want to do any flag-waving,” says Silke Korporal, head of global design at McDonald’s, “so we didn’t advertise a sustainable decor inside the design. We just wanted it to be. 

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