Think You Can’t Recycle Your Big Game Day Pizza Box? Shake It Off!

If you’re reading this, you’ve found one of the rarest items on the internet: a piece of Big Game Day content that isn’t about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce!

Instead, it’s about something almost as beloved as Swift and something almost as polarizing as her prominence in TV coverage of the Kansas City Chiefs.

I’m talking about pizza—and more importantly, whether and how pizza boxes can be recycled.

Last year, Americans ate an estimated 13 million pizzas during the Big Game, and the Paper and Packaging Board took the opportunity to educate consumers about how easy it can be to make those pies a little more sustainable.

And this year, pizza box recycling made it into our top five recycling trends—the developments in sustainability that are leading the “vibe shift” away from less environmentally-friendly materials and toward being a papertarian.

Last year we focused on getting the word out about our analysis, produced by Resource Recycling Systems, and highlighting the 10 states and the District of Columbia that we called “pizza box powerhouses,” where at least 90% of residents can readily recycle their pizza boxes.

The top ten include Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont.

By my math, those superstar jurisdictions add up to more than 37 million Americans. But the reality is that the majority of people have access to pizza box recycling, even though our survey data shows a sizable chunk of them don’t realize it.

That’s consequential, since the corrugated in the approximately 3 billion pizzas consumed each year amounts to about 600,000 tons of corrugated that can and should be diverted from landfills and used to make new and useful products.

There are lots of reasons why consumers are confused. In the past, they saw mixed messages from local recycling programs and waste management operators. Most of the “controversy” centers on the grease residue—or stuck-on cheese—which must be dealt with by recycling facilities intaking those boxes. But the reality is that they can recycle and are recycling these boxes every day— cheese grease and all—and that’s why we’ve been on a mission to get them to update their messaging so consumers are better informed.

To be sure, there remain regional differences in whether and how those boxes are accepted for recycling, which is why consumers should always check local guidelines to be safe, and why we are pointing them to The Recycling Partnership’s great resources on the subject. Consumers also need to do their part and Empty. Flatten. Recycle.