Downtown Fredericksburg has a new place for used pizza boxes. The city partnered with a couple of local pizza restaurants on a recycling system that starts with screened receptacles right outside the shops, labeled “pizza boxes only, no trash.”
“Daniel,” the manager at Benny Vitali’s, said they worked with the city to put the bins out front so customers can drop their used boxes. “We didn’t pay for them,” he said. “They’re mainly specific to our boxes.” Benny’s uses a large pizza box, bigger than normal, so the bin has a larger opening.
Up the street at Mellow Mushroom on William Street, there’s another pizza box bin. The kitchen manager said the boxes didn’t fit in the regular trash can, so they sometimes just piled on top. After that happened a few times, they approached the city, and now they have a bin too. A third pizza box bin is down at City Dock.
The bins were built and installed by the public works department and paid for with tax money from the bag tax, the city said. They’re emptied on the regular trash run a few times a week.
The pizza box recycling dilemma is happening everywhere, and some places have found ways to recycle them as-is. The American Forest & Paper Association looked into it too.
“A study confirmed that pizza boxes are recyclable by paper mills. Grease and cheese in an amount typically found on pizza boxes are not an issue for the recycling process. Simply remove leftover pizza and place the box in the recycling bin,” they reported.
Pizza boxes are already being recycled at paper mills across the country, and the industry wants more of them back. About 3 billion pizza boxes are used in the U.S. each year — that’s about 600,000 tons of cardboard that could be collected for recycling, the American Forest & Paper Association added.
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