We all love a takeaway from time to time. A busy day at work, the munchies after an evening at the pub or just a pang to indulge can make a pizza an irresistible choice, especially when they can be ordered for delivery with a tap of a smartphone.
What’s the best thing to do with the packaging once you’re as stuffed as the pizza crust? Can you recycle takeaway pizza boxes?
Pizza Boxes can be recycled as they’re made from cardboard. The greasier they are, the lower their value as a recyclable material. Wiping off remnants of pizza base or topping is important, and if you’ve got used paper napkins, use them to sponge off as much remaining cooking oil as possible.
Pizza boxes are a prime example of the confusion that exists around recycling, and in particular what can go into residential paper and card recycling bins for collection. It’s actually quite straightforward, but horrendously badly communicated.
As a rule of thumb, anything made from paper or cardboard (including thin card) should be fine to be sent for recycling, but even some councils we spoke to gave conflicting advice. The issue seems to come from purity.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that a greasy pizza box is going to take a lot more effort to recycle into new packaging materials than a crisp single use box that’s been used for delivering something that’s not dripping in cooking fat. It doesn’t means that the pizza box can’t be recycled though – far from it.
How Are Pizza Boxes Recycled?
Like almost all paper and card, pizza boxes get a new lease of life by being pulped. That’s a process that involves adding water to shred them back down to their fibres, and eventually drained and dried to be used fresh.
In the middle of that process, impurities must be removed, and recycling lines have clever ways of achieving that. Let’s be clear – getting cooking oil out of cardboard isn’t one of the easier tricks they perform, but unlike when we talked about the lack of demand for recycled balloons, recycled cardboard is has huge appeal.
Imagine how much cardboard Amazon gets through every day – and they’re just one of the many companies on the planet shipping vast quantities of products to their customers day in, day out.
During 2020 when large parts of the world were stuck at home, it was well documented that cardboard supplies were running low, as people relied more heavily on home deliveries and less people were able to be out and about taking their recycling to public collection points.
That shows that at peak times, we need to be recycling as much cardboard as possible, even those pizza boxes with a little more grease soaked in than we’d like.
How Can I Make Pizza Boxes More Recyclable?
The cleaner we can make boxes the better when they go into the recycling. That means that making a small effort to clean up the box can really help the chances of it living its best life again after it arrives at the recycling plant.
What’s not sensible is using up a new roll of kitchen towel to get every last bit of grease out that you can – clearly you’re just contaminating a perfectly good roll of Bounty (other brands are available, and probably cheaper).
A better approach is to simply use your cutlery to scrape any solid remains into the kitchen bin, then use whatever you’ve got that’s already destined for the bin to get off the grease that’s easily shifted.
In my house, we keep a few sheets of kitchen towel to one side if they’re not particularly soiled, just like we don’t use a fresh cloth or pad for the sink after each round of washing up. Then they’re handy when there’s something like a pizza box to clean ready for the recycling bin.
If there’s a bit of the box that’s sodden with fatty cooking oil, I’ll just rip that bit off and the rest of the box that’s cleaner goes into the recycling, but in general, after a brief 30 second cleaning mission, it’s fine.
Why Do People Say Pizza Boxes Can’t Be Recycled?
Going back to the original point, pizza boxes are made from cardboard, and cardboard can be recycled. Sounds straight forward, right? Well it should do – because it is!
When people say pizza boxes can’t be recycled, what they really mean is the grease that contaminates them can’t be recycled, and that’s also true. Way back when universal coverage with dedicated recycling bins for homes was rolling out, the guidance was simply that dry paper and card was all that could go in. That was simply to get the nation up and running quickly, and because the facilities needed for purifying the waste during the recycling process was far more primitive than it is today.
What we’re now able to recycle has come on leaps and bounds – for example, no-one recycled iPads in 2007 – because they didn’t exist! Today, it’s very much frowned upon not to recycle electronics like tablets, as the components and materials in them are so valuable. That doesn’t mean every last piece of an iPad gets recycled every time, just like the grease doesn’t get a new life with the cardboard of a pizza box!
