Oil/grease is one of the worst contaminates in the paper recycling process because paper recycling undergoes a heat process, gets mixed with water and pulverized to paper pulp to make recycled paper. If there is oil in the paper pulp mixture then the paper ends up having spots and holes.
About three years ago we wrote about the fact that many corrugated cardboard pizza boxes are recyclable if and only if they are clean. You can read about the pizza box recycling debate here.
We hope that by spreading the word about this and providing you with some visuals about the seriousness of ruining entire batches of recycling because you didn’t know that oil soaked cardboard shouldn’t be recycled in any amount, we can make people aware of this simple point: it might be better to throw that oily box away.
If you still want to recycle that pizza then there are great ways to go about this:
- If the top half of the pizza box has no grease on it then feel free to rip that half away from the bottom and recycle the top half!
- Share this article with others who could learn a thing or two about how recycled paper is made, trust us, they won’t forget the next time they have an oily pizza box!
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