Holding the extra-large pizza box in your hands, you eye the garbage can, knowing it won’t easily fit. You turn and look at the recycling bin, wondering if you could stuff it in there to save room in your trash. You’ve heard the rumors that pizza boxes shouldn’t go in recycling…but it also feels wrong to not put this bulky cardboard in with the others.
What do you do?
The rumors are true – pizza boxes don’t belong in the recycling bin…at least the parts with food and grease stains on them. These can contaminate the load of recyclables and make them unusable. That would be a waste of your and everyone else’s efforts to recycle. Oil sticks to cardboard, and changes the way the fibers mesh together so they are not able to be re-used.
However, that doesn’t mean you have to send the entire box to the landfill. Like most thing when it comes to recycling, a little bit of your time can go a long way toward diverting waste toward something better.
Stop and look at the pizza box before you try to fit it into your trash bin. Does the top of the box have food or grease on it? If it doesn’t, you can rip it in half and put at least part of it in the recycling bin.
The greasy half of your pizza box isn’t necessarily destined for the trash bag either. If you, or someone you know, does backyard composting for their garden – these boxes can be added to the pile! Simply cut up the dirty pieces and toss them in your compost bin.
While ripping off the lids or cutting up the clean parts of the boxes seems like an extra amount of work just to dispose of one pizza box…think about how much effort it takes to squeeze those large boxes in the trash. It really doesn’t take much more energy to put the clean part of the box in the recycle bin.