I don’t know about this one, it doesn’t look too appetizing. Besides, the grease will start leaking through the cardboard “plates.”

Core77 has a write up about the pizza box:

Another ancient empire legacy food is pizza, which was reportedly invented in Ancient Greece (an assertion that can get you punched in the face in parts of Brooklyn). In America, the effects of pizza are pernicious: In addition to contributing to bulging waistlines, pizza is a high-waste food. Every pizza place I know delivers the pie in a cardboard box and throws in a stack of paper plates.

A company called Eco Incorporated has invented the GreenBox, a better pizza box that we can at least get a little more use out of before we throw away, and which can perhaps supplant the paper plates.

The whole recycling green agenda is a bit overblown. In most cases (excluding scrap metals) it doesn’t make sense to recycle:

One of most interesting treatments of the problem of markets and waste disposal is by an old friend of mine, Peter VanDoren. He writes:

Some policy analysts justify government intervention in refuse collection by invoking market-failure arguments in the collection of recyclables. Why don’t free markets for recycling work? Well, in some circumstances they do. Scrap yards, for example, recycle iron and steel. The growth segment in the U.S. steel industry is the so-called “minimill” whose raw material is recycled. Recycling markets work fine in this sector of the economy because making steel from virgin iron and coal is more expensive than making it from recycled raw materials. In other areas of the economy involving glass, paper, and plastic, for example, the discrepancy between recycled and virgin prices often does not justify the development of markets for recycling…. [S]upport for recycling is more religious than economic in nature.

Markets can handle lots of things that look like “recycling.” We reuse copper, even stripping it from old homes before they are torn down. I rent a car at Hervis, and take it back two days later so someone else can use it. And when I finish with the turkey at Thanksgiving, or the ham at Easter, I always boil the bones to make soup. That soup is much cheaper, and better, as a result of recycling the bones. None of these things is mandatory; we do them automatically, because they make economic sense.

What VanDoren means by “religious” is that the claims for recycling rest on an assumed, if not always articulated, moral imperative rather than on trade-offs or costs. But underlying this claim, for many people at least, is some murky idea that recycling “uses up” fewer resources than making things from scratch. Or, in the case of glass, making bottles from sand. As one earnest young staffer at a public works department in the northeast told me, “Recycling is cheaper, no matter how much it costs!” You can believe, if you want, that there is some mystical quality of products that make them valuable, and that price is the wrong measure of value. But if prices matter, lots of recycling we now do is irrational.

The difference between cullet (glass ground up by machines, using electricity) and sand (rocks ground up by nature) is clear: most cullet is full of additives, contaminants, and impurities. These contaminants are trapped in the cullet, inert and harmless. But if someone melts the cullet, an important step for making new glass, the contaminants can become toxic releases into the atmosphere, water, or soil. The impurities introduced by even small amounts of merged colors or types of glass in waste streams make mixed cullet nearly useless.

Sand, by contrast, is cheap and can be made into glass without extra steps, extra expense, or extra danger to the environment.

Going green without thinking things through.