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Yes, You Can Recycle Your Pizza Boxes
BY ADAM MINTER | JUL 28 2020
from SIERRA - The national magazine of the Sierra Club

 excerpt...

When Eric Nelson looks back on his years as a waste reduction manager at the University of Kansas, what stands out are the pizza boxes. "One year, there was a first-week event for all the clubs and organizations," he told me on a phone call from Lawrence. "I think Pizza Hut sent over like 500 medium one-topping pizzas." That was great for the hungry college students, not so much for Nelson, who spent the evening schlepping 500 pizza boxes to the dumpster "because we couldn't recycle pizza boxes."

It's advice from the dawn of curbside recycling: Don't put your pizza box in the blue bin because the greasy cardboard and cheese scraps make it unrecyclable. For years, conscientious recyclers followed this advice, and tens of billions of pizza boxes were sent to landfills and incinerators. The intentions were good, but it turns out that the advice wasn't. New research reveals that, so long as you remove all the pizza, the cardboard container that held your Veggie Supreme can be readily recycled into something new.

That’s good news, because all those pizza boxes add up. A single dorm floor at the University of Kansas, says Nelson, might go through 20 to 30 boxes during a single party. According to new research from WestRock, one of the world's largest paper and packaging companies, 3 billion pizza boxes are sold in the United States annually. Altogether, they weigh 600,000 tons—the equivalent of 53 Eiffel Towers. If they were all recycled, they would account for 2.6 percent of the recyclable cardboard generated in the US annually.

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