Empty takeaway pizza boxes can be recycled in your paper and card bin at home as they’re made from cardboard. Just make sure there’s no leftover pizza still in the box and not too much grease!
If the cardboard is too greasy, it can cause problems in the recycling process. Recycling plants have to reject tonnes of cardboard every year, sending it to landfill or to be incinerated instead.
Once you’ve emptied your pizza box of any leftovers (which should go in your food waste bin), take a good look at the amount of grease left and decide.
But even if the bottom of the box is pretty greasy (even after you’ve wiped it out with kitchen towel or a napkin), there’s a good chance the lid is fine, so make the most of the opportunity to recycle that bit. Half a box is better than nothing!
One final thought. Even if the cardboard is too greasy for recycling, you could still rip it up and add the pieces to a compost heap – cardboard is 100% biodegradable.
The recycling process for paper and cardboard uses cold water, which is ineffective when it comes to tackling grease. You can read more about recycling card and paper in our blog.
Pizza boxes containing shop bought pizzas are a completely different proposition from their takeaway equivalents.
That’s because the pizza inside is generally wrapped in a plastic cover, which means the cardboard box is grease-free, so totally recyclable. If there is a plastic ‘window’ on the box, removing that before putting the box in the recycling will help the process farther down the line. Every little helps, as one supermarket likes to say.
