You know: creative solutions to complex problems. In New York, a huge city with even greater love fast foodhas been thinking about what to do with the waste from cardboard pizza boxes for a while. It may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s serious business in the Big Apple. Thousands and thousands of pizzas are eaten there every day, and after every feast there is always the same thing left: a large square cardboard box with the occasional gnawed edge and often stained with sauce or grease. It is often not easy to place them in regular litter boxes. And if the box emerges, it means you are at the mercy of the insects. Or worse, rats (not a few) wandering around the city.

To solve this, those responsible for their major city park, the iconic Central Park, came up with an idea: install a special bucket for pizza boxes.

What do I do with this now? This is probably the question many New Yorkers and tourists who come to Central Park ask themselves every day to experience the pleasure of eating a pizza in the heart of downtown New York. After the picnic, they’re left with a large (and sticky) cardboard box that barely fits in their trash can. Even if they are civil neighbors and are busy folding the container to fit into the container, this will most likely still be a problem: it usually takes up a large part of the space. It even blocks it.

Is the problem that serious? It’s definitely nothing specific. Betsy Smith, director of the Central Park Conservancy, which has been responsible for maintaining the park for decades, explains that on a sunny day, workers might find themselves behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art with more than 100 boxes. And they insist: This applies only to a certain area of ​​\u200b\u200b341 hectares of the park.

People leave them piled on top of garbage cans and recycling bins. Some even choose to disassemble them and put them in compartments, but this does not solve the problem. It is much more difficult to continue to dispose of waste with bins inside. The situation has escalated to the point where pizza boxes have become a “huge problem” for the Central Park Conservancy. “It wasn’t an effective way to collect trash,” they say.

If something doesn’t work… Better to replace it, which is exactly what the Central Park Conservancy is doing to end the pizza box mess. Their idea is simple: to install a special container for pizza packaging, a collector created for the purpose of stacking boxes in an orderly manner. And above all, prevent their exposure to insects and rodents; This is another major issue that has led the city to rethink waste management.

“People want to do the right thing, they want to recycle, and we’re giving them a better opportunity to do that,” Smith says New York Times. They’ve only installed one of these new containers so far, but park staff will dedicate themselves to emptying the containers at least three times a day. Küp is also located in a very popular area among picnic lovers.

A $1,500 container. “Traditional circular dumpsters are not designed to hold bins, which causes them to get stuck and attract rodents,” Central Park Conservancy spokeswoman Kat Brady told NBC. The pilot cube was “specifically designed” for the popular square cardboard boxes, can hold about 50 containers – but can hold more if they’re crushed – and costs $1,500. If the experiment works and produces good results, the model can be moved to other parts of Central Park.

But… Is there that much pizza? If the Central Park Conservancy’s hundred boxes a day reference wasn’t enough, there are other indicators that give some insight into how much New Yorkers adore pizza. Some sources say they eat up to 500,000 pizzas every day, and the most popular pizzerias use more than a thousand boxes a day. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Big Apple, of course. ten years ago Atlantic And Washington Post They replicated a study that concluded the U.S. pizza industry serves 100 acres (equivalent to about 40.5 hectares) of food per day.

The passion for pizza is so prominent in the Big Apple New York Times, the city’s sanitation department adapted its operations to deal with the avalanche of waste generated by these dishes. Unlike what happens in other cities where oil containers are not recycled (there are many), in New York this can be done after a few days or even a few hours. This allows them to be turned into paper rolls, cartons or new boxes.

Picture | Central Park Preserve

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