America loves pizza, spending over $46.3 billion on those hot, gooey disks of deliciousness annually, according to trade publication PMQ Pizza Magazine. That amore generates 3 billion pizza boxes a year as well, the equivalent of 600,000 tons of corrugated cardboard material, that, if recyclable, is highly useful and desirable. But before feeling guilty over the wasted cardboard and heading to social media to post #BoycottPizza #Sustainability, you should know that the pizza box sitting in the fridge right now is curbside recyclable.
Probably.
In the US, there is no consistency across the country when it comes to what gets captured as recyclable materials. Nonetheless, a recent study released by corrugated cardboard supplier WestRock found that pizza boxes can indeed be recycled despite the grease stains and bits of cheese still clinging to the surface. Though grease does weaken the fibers, the total amount has a negligible effect when incorporated into the rest of the collected corrugated cardboard, and cheese does not affect the material’s recyclability.
