College Pizza Box Composting

by Aryn Aiken

     Some may say delivery pizza is a college student’s best friend, but it can be recycling’s worst enemy. Because paper recycling is a water-based process, cardboard pizza boxes are many times made unrecyclable by grease from everyone’s favorite late-night comfort food. Dirty pizza boxes become a contaminant in the paper recycling system. College students at North Carolina State University saw this problem on their campus and started the Pizza Box Composting Project. They gathered volunteers, participants, and bins to compost around 16,000 greasy pizza boxes in the past year. Waste disposal problems on college campuses are being addressed more and more by students across the country. What could your campus do to decrease its contribution to landfills? Could you start a pizza composting project at your school? Read more about NC State’s Pizza Composting Project here.