When pizzas are transported in carryout boxes, oil seeps into the cardboard and makes the box unrecyclable. In the recycling process, paper and cardboard are mixed with water to make a slurry. When contaminants such as oil are introduced, the whole batch of slurry becomes landfill because contaminated slurry makes for poor-quality paper that is not worth using ("Because You Asked: Why Can't I Recycle Stuff with Food n It?", 2014). Even small amounts of contaminants can ruin products made from recycled material. In fact, if contaminated materials are used to produce food packaging, the contaminants can migrate into food and become safety hazards (Triantafyllou, Akrida-Demertzi, & Demertzis, 2006). Food waste is one of the top five recycling contaminants, and if dirty materials go through recycling machinery, they can clog the system, leading to significant downtime at recycling centers (Marshall & Bandhauer, 2017). With the ever-growing threat of climate change and resource depletion, humans need to be more aware of how they use resources. In the city of Denver, only 12% of the waste was recycled, but if recycling contamination were to be eliminated, the recycling rate could be 16%, which represents a difference of over nine thousand tons of waste (McMillin, 2019; Cotton, 2017). Being able to recycle pizza boxes would decrease the amount of waste sent to landfills, so more work needs to be done to stop oil from ruining batches of recycling.