Are pizza boxes recyclable? The case for the reusable pizza box.


What should we do with the cardboard pizza box after we have eaten our deliciously hot takeaway pizza?

In which bin does the cardboard pizza box go? Do we throw the used pizza box in the recycling bin so it can get recycled, or in a black bin bag that will end up burning in an incinerator, which generates lots of CO2 emissions?

How to dispose of the single-use cardboard pizza box is a decision that is made at least 300 million times, as this is the number of takeaway pizzas ordered in UK homes every year.

In the UK the question of pizza box sustainability is increasingly poignant, as the market size of the fast food and takeaway industry keeps growing, in 2022, in the United Kingdom the market is forecast to reach £20.61 billion. Last year customer spending rose by 128% and people are eating more and more takeaway pizzas, with now over 6,000 pizza takeaway and delivery restaurants operating across the UK.

Can you recycle pizza boxes in the UK?

Even if your pizza box is made of recyclable cardboard, when it is too greasy and has encrusted food the actual pizza box is no longer recyclable. So whenever you have a pizza box that looks like the one below, it needs to go into the black bin bag. That means your pizza box will be burnt in an incinerator instead of recycled, increasing your carbon footprint. The reason is that when there is too much oil and grease in the process, it can ruin the entire recycled paper and card batch at the recycling mill.

Pizza box too greasy to be recycled. If placed on the recycling bin it can contaminate an entire batch.

Cutting the greasy cheesy bottom of pizza boxes to recycle the clean cardboard

Cutting the contaminated bottom of the box seems to be the best way to recycle the clean parts, avoiding contamination of the batch at the recycling paper mill and only sending the least possible amount of cardboard to an incineration plant.

Negative Emissions is developing a pilot program aimed at single-use cardboard pizza box manufacturers. If you’re in the industry and would like to know more, simply click here to reach out to us.

Are single-use cardboard pizza boxes a good solution for pizza delivery?

Nothing can be recycled forever. The challenge with paper and cardboard recycling is that each time it is recycled the fibres in it become shorter.

Cardboard pizza fibre, just like a cat, has only about seven lives, after which it can only be used for newsprint or flimsy low-quality materials. This is because after cardboard is recycled seven times, the fibres become too short and too weak for use in sturdy applications

The seven times recycled is a best case scenario, since a large number of pizza boxes are discarded in the black bin bag today and thus burnt in an incinerator.

Specific figures to pizza boxes are not available, but for all packaging in the UK close to 35% of paper & card ends up in black bin bags.

That means that every year we burn around 105 million pizza boxes in incinerators, causing an estimated 62,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, released in the atmosphere.

On top of this, pizza boxes are made with a mixture of recycled and virgin material. The outer layer is usually made from newly cut trees, as virgin fibres yield a higher cardboard quality for printing on the box. And the inner cardboard layer is made of a mix of recycled and virgin fibres. Negative Emissions estimates the typical pizza box will consist of 40% virgin fibres from new trees and based on our calculations to sustain the UK’s single-use pizza box consumption, we are cutting down around 330,000 trees every year.

A vast forest area is needed to support this level of consumption, larger than we may think, as trees need to be grown for a 30 year period.

Tree plantations, mostly in Scandinavia outside of the UK, are currently growing close to 10 million trees to cover the UK’s pizza box consumption, which covers a surface area twice that of greater London, or 3% the surface area of England (around 3600 km2).

Negative Emissions flow showing the loop for pizza boxes in the UK.

Is there an alternative to single-use cardboard pizza boxes?

We haven’t found an alternative for the single-use disposable cardboard pizza box used for takeaway pizza in the UK, but there are alternatives in Europe with Vytal, a German startup company. Vytal has raised €10 million to roll-out its reusable containers including a reusable pizza box developed by PIZZycle, another German startup.

Are we finally at the right time for the reusable pizza box to go mainstream?

The solution to rapidly reduce emissions and the logging of trees are pizza boxes that can be reused hundreds of times. The recent success that Vytal, a reusable packaging company has been experiencing in Germany, indicates that at least for the German market, the time for reusable packaging at scale has arrived, Vytal also offers reusable pizza boxes to pizzerias in Germany on a pay-per-use system with no upfront costs to restaurants.

Research by Negative Emissions shows that a single pizza delivery or takeaway business that shifts to reusables has the potential to reduce its CO2 emissions footprint by 10 tonnes.

It will also free up 0.7 ​​km2 of land to sustain the logging of 55 trees per year to produce the 40% of virgin fibres. The land size is so high as it takes 30 years to grow a tree in an FSC-certified plantation before it can be cut.

Every 100 restaurants that shift 10 deliveries to CLUBZERØ per day will prevent 1000 tonnes of CO2 per year by avoiding one million single-use plastic items. 

By choosing reusable alternatives to the cardboard pizza box, you’ll be saving timber that can be put to much better use, into durable long-lasting materials that act as true carbon sinks.

How can we make reusable pizza boxes even more sustainable?

Today, reusable pizza boxes are made out of highly durable recyclable hard plastics. To make these truly sustainable two big changes are needed in the way recycling works.

First, we need to make sure all hard plastics are actually recycled. At present in the UK less than 10% are recycled. To do this we need to introduce better collection systems for plastics from home, where everyone receives a recycling bin for all plastics. To make sure even the stuff that people don’t put in the recycling bin is recycled, sorting of plastics out of black bags meant for incineration should also become a mandatory practice, such as in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Only in this way will we be able to recycle more than 95% of all hard plastics.

Second, we need better hard plastics materials which are recyclable more than 7 times, such as the PDK plastic which is in the research lab phase. 

Are you a pizzeria owner or manager looking for reusable pizza box solutions?

Negative Emissions is working on accelerating the introduction and adoption of the reusable pizza box model in the UK, if you think we can help you understand if reusables are a good fit for your business, we’d love to hear from you at getstarted@negativeemissions.co.uk.