While officials in Amsterdam are contending with a seemingly never-ending garbage heap, in Leiden they have decided to focus on a specific type of troublesome trash.

For years, pizza boxes have piled up in the city’s parks and other public spaces on sunny days and now Leiden has launched new recycling containers designed specifically to deal with them.

“Pizza boxes regularly cause blockages and clog up waste bins because of their size,” Leiden council spokesperson Dewi van Duijn told Dutch News. Each container – there are four in total – can hold a few dozen boxes and once they’re picked up by sanitation workers, they’re hauled off to a local recycling centre as usual.

“It is a pilot programme, temporary for the time being,” Van Duijn said. “Depending on the success rate, we will see whether, and in what way, we will continue with it in the future.”

The success rate in Leiden will be judged according to how many boxes are put in the containers every day and if other rubbish is dumped in them as well.

Global efforts

Similar containers are being tested in other cities around the globe. In May, the Central Park Conservancy in New York City installed one behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art to hopefully keep Manhattan’s now famous ‘pizza rats’ at bay.

But not everyone is pleased with these new containers. One Leiden organisation wishes the city’s leaders would have directed their time and effort towards other long lingering problems with litter.

De Grachtwacht, an environmental group committed to keeping rubbish out of Leiden’s canals, has spent the past several years trying to get local officials to focus on arguably larger and messier problems.

“Unfortunately, we see overflowing bins along the canals all year round, even in the middle of winter,” biologist and De Grachtwacht co-founder Liselotte Rambonnet told Dutch News. “Of course we hope the new pizza bins will help but, as far as we are concerned, the municipality can take much more important steps.”

“They should add more waste bins, empty them more often, and make sure they close with flaps so that birds cannot pull anything out,” she said.

From an environmental prospective, pizza boxes aren’t much of a concern says Rambonnet. After all, they are biodegradable and break down quicker, especially in water.

“It’s great the municipality is tackling litter, but we hope they won’t just get stuck on pizza boxes,” Rambonnet said.  “A nice summer day with lots of pizza eaters in the parks, that only happens once in a while, but with the market it happens twice a week all year round.”