NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Over 1,300 pizza boxes were recycled within the first six months of the Central Park Conservancy’s pizza box recycling bin initiative, marking a step toward greater sustainability.
Last May, pizza box recycling bins were installed in an effort to maintain a cleaner Central Park and a more eco-friendly way to discard pizza boxes.
Margaret Asaro, the vice president for park maintenance and infrastructure at the conservancy, said she and her team often found pizza boxes clogging up trash cans, especially in high-volume picnic areas. If they weren’t in trash cans, they were left scattered on the ground, which led to overflowing trash and rodents.
“We thought we could come up with a solution that tackled both the maintenance issue of pizza boxes being crammed into those little round holes of our waste cans and also divert them from the landfill waste stream and allow us to recycle them as cardboard,” Asaro told 1010 WINS.
Four pizza recycling bins were placed in Central Park last May: at Sheep Meadow, West 81st Street, East Pinetum and East 97th Street. Each bin held 25 to 30 pizza boxes and were checked by Conservancy staff two to three times a day.
From the pizza boxes collected, the Conservancy added 34 tons of paper and cardboard to its recycling in 2024. Asaro also highlighted that much of the cardboard recycled in the city was used to make new pizza boxes.
The bins have been temporarily removed for the winter but will return in May, with additional bins set to be introduced on Memorial Day.
“We really want to expand the program,” Asaro said. “We are in the process of also developing a kind of more permanent design that can be incorporated and be well-aligned with our existing cans.”
For now, though—and especially for those who plan to eat pizza on Feb. 9, when National Pizza Day and the Super Bowl coincide—the Department of Sanitation says “lightly soiled” pizza boxes can be recycled with cardboard recycling.