Amsterdam has become the first capital city in the world to ban public advertisements for meat products, as well as for products that use fossil fuels, such as cars and flights.
BBC News reports, “At one of the city’s busiest tram stops, adjacent to a grassy roundabout bursting with vibrant yellow daffodils and orange tulips, the poster advertising landscape has changed.
“They now promote the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, and a piano concert. Until last week it was chicken nuggets, SUVs and low-budget holidays.”
The city’s lawmakers say the move is part of a broader initiative to make the city “carbon-neutral” by 2050, which includes encouraging residents to halve their meat consumption by 2050.
“The climate crisis is very urgent,” says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party.
“I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?
“Most people don’t understand why the municipality should make money out of renting our public space with something that we are actively having policies against.”
Meat and fossil-fuel advertising made up a vanishingly small proportion of advertisements in the city—the former, just 0.1% of total ad spending—but advocates of the new regulation believe it sends a “strong message” and “reframes purely dietary advice to a climate issue.”
The Dutch Meat Association branded the ban “an undesirable way to influence consumer behaviour.”
It adds that meat “delivers essential nutrients and should remain visible and accessible to consumers.”
Lawmakers in Amsterdam took their lead from nearby Harlem, which in 2022 became the first city in the world to ban most meat advertising in public spaces, a move it followed in 2024 with a ban on advertising fossil-fuel products too.
Globally, more than a dozen cities—Edinburgh, Sheffield, Stockholm and Florence among them—have banned fossil-fuel advertising or are moving to do so.
An expert interviewed by the BBC said the advertising ban on meat products is a “fantastic natural experiment,” which will provide evidence of whether such measures can be used to change “social norms” and reduce consumption.
“If we see advertisements for fast food everywhere, it normalizes the consumption of behaviour of fast consumption,” says Mackenbach, who is from the Department of Epidemiology and Data Science at hospital Amsterdam University Medical Center.
“So if we take away those types of cues in our public living environments, then that is also going to have an impact on those social norms.”
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2 Responses
Anneke Veenhoff has a look of sheer stupidity and unabridged naivete in her eyes
Anke Bakker has a look o extreme arrogance and severely repressed anger on her face
Neither one of these Quislings should be given any authority over anything, anywhere!
They’ll be so “carbon-neutral” when their population starts dying of starvation after first banning farmers, now food advertisements. A lot less carbon walking around and consuming all of “their” resources. You are already being replaced with compliant, insect-eating Africans. You voted for it so you deserve everything you get.