My city says don’t recycle pizza boxes or cardboard with oil on it. I get it, but where do you draw the line? Surely one speck of oil won’t ruin a whole batch of pulp, otherwise they would have no hope for a pure batch of paper. One out of 1 million people could ruin it each week. I saw a previous that discusses “why no pizza boxes” but it doesn’t explain how much grease is too much.
In: Chemistry
There really isn’t a precise cut-off. Neither in law nor in common sense.
If it feels greasy overall or even drips, then clearly no. If it looks clean and feels like cardboard, then there should be no reasons not to treat it like any other cardboard that contained food (e.g. frozen pizza packaging).
Anything else… as said there is no fixed rule. I usually treat it as okay if it’s just a few individual drops of fat in the paper, but if it already soaked or flowed to form larger stains than single drops, that’s usually where I cut the line.
Just try to make a best effort and don’t feel bad with whatever choice you took!
Like they’re actually recycling and not just shipping that waste off to some 3rd world country for ‘recycling’
Pretty sure any grease at all is too much. They don’t have an efficient way to separate contaminated cardboard from the rest, and they don’t want the grease on your box to spread to other boxes.
In Italy, we’re allowed to put those in the Umido (food) bin. Even the info cards have photo’s on it.
The dudes at the sorting facility aren’t going to open it up and inspect it, they’re going to see a pizza box and divert that load to the landfill.
I usually tear off the top and put it in recycling. The bottom always has grease. Top is clean.
For recycling really any is too much, there is no effective way to treat them once contaminated.
In most places most non Commercial Paper Trash gets sold to incinerators.
And incinerators don’t care for a bit of Oil or Chese that is still on the box.
No idea but our waste management company (literally called Waste Management) says you can recycle them, even if there’s grease/some cheese on it
It’s a very popular myth that cardboard pizza boxes are not recyclable. Think about it – if that was true, almost no load of cardboard would actually be recycled. The same goes for plastic and glass containers of olive oil, etc. Throw your pizza boxes in the recycling and don’t worry about it.
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