BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
Since May 1, Amsterdam’s billboards and tram shelters no longer carry ads for burgers, petrol cars, or cheap flights. The Dutch capital is now the first in the world to ban public advertising for both meat and fossil fuel products.
Where chicken nuggets and SUVs once competed for wall space, the Rijksmuseum and a piano concert now fill the gaps.
The targets behind the ban: carbon neutral by 2050, and meat consumption halved over the same period. Councillors from the GreenLeft Party and Party for the Animals co-authored the restrictions, dismissing industry objections as self-interested.
“The climate crisis is very urgent,” says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party. “If you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?”
Grouping meat with fossil fuels is the point
Meat made up an estimated 0.1 percent of Amsterdam’s outdoor ad market before the ban. Politically, that’s not the point. Placing burgers alongside flights and diesel cars in the same restricted category reframes dietary choice as a climate issue. That’s the political argument, and it’s deliberate.
Anke Bakker, Amsterdam’s group leader for Party for the Animals and the politician who drove the ban, pushes back on nanny-state accusations. “We are trying to get the big companies not to tell us all the time what we need to eat and buy,” she says. “In a way, we’re giving people more freedom because they can make their own choice.”
The Dutch Meat Association has called the move “an undesirable way to influence consumer behaviour,” adding that meat “delivers essential nutrients and should remain visible and accessible to consumers.” The Dutch Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators described it as a disproportionate curb on commercial freedom.
Amsterdam is not the first, but it’s the most visible
Haarlem, 18 kilometers (11 miles) to the west, announced a broad ban on most meat advertising in 2022, which came into force in 2024 alongside a fossil fuel ad ban. Utrecht and Nijmegen followed. Edinburgh, Sheffield, Stockholm, and Florence have moved to restrict fossil fuel advertising. France has a nationwide ban.
When a capital city moves, other governments notice.
Activists like lawyer Hannah Prins, who worked with campaign group Fossil-Free Advertising to push the ban through, are framing it as a “tobacco moment” for high-carbon food. “Johan Cruyff would be in advertisements for tobacco,” Prins says. “That used to be normal. He died of lung cancer. What we see in our public space is what we find normal in our society.”
Does removing ads actually change behaviour?
Researchers don’t yet know. There’s no direct evidence that stripping meat ads from bus shelters moves people toward plant-based diets.
Prof Joreintje Mackenbach, an epidemiologist from Amsterdam University Medical Center, thinks Amsterdam is running a useful natural experiment. “If we see advertisements for fast food everywhere, it normalizes the consumption of fast consumption,” she says. “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.”
Worth noting: a study of London Underground’s 2019 ban on junk food advertising found fewer people buying those products across the UK capital.
The bigger problem the ban doesn’t solve is digital. The same 19-euro ($21.00) flight to Berlin that disappeared from the tram shelter keeps showing up in social media feeds. Prins knows the restriction doesn’t reach that far. For her, that’s beside the point. Cities decide what their walls say. Amsterdam finally said something.
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