I've been 'recycling' my pizza boxes wrong for like 20 years

My kid's 5th grade teacher sent home a project about contamination in the recycling stream. I was helping him with it last Tuesday, and we looked at a picture of a greasy pizza box. I pointed and said 'See, that goes in the blue bin.' He just looked at me and said 'Dad, the paper says that's wrong, the grease wrecks the whole batch.' I felt my whole adult life was a lie. I called our local waste center in Springfield, and the guy confirmed it over the phone, saying 'If it's got cheese stuck to it, it's trash.' I must have ruined hundreds of pounds of good paper. Has anyone else had a basic household rule they got completely backwards?

3 comments

3 Comments

foster.jordan20d ago

That "cheese stuck to it, it's trash" line hit me hard. I did the exact same thing for years, just tossing the whole box in. It feels so wrong to throw a big cardboard thing in the regular garbage, you know? I guess the grease and food bits are too hard to clean out of the paper pulp. Now I just tear off the clean top lid for recycling and trash the greasy bottom.

shane_clark20d ago

Actually, the grease is the real problem, not the cheese bits.

dylan_brown3020d ago

Oh man, this is a huge one. I saw a whole news segment about this last year, and my mind was blown in the same way. They showed how just one oily pizza box can mess up a ton of good, clean cardboard at the recycling plant. I totally get what @foster.jordan is saying, it feels awful to trash that much cardboard. I’ve started doing the tear-off method too, but sometimes that bottom is so soggy it just falls apart. Makes you wonder what else we’re all getting wrong.