As an obsessive recycler, I am often confounded by the delivery/take out pizza box. It’s a pretty substantial piece of cardboard of limited utility. Many recyclers won’t accept it since it’s usually contaminated by contact with food. Moreover, most pizza boxes are manufactured using relatively little recycled content.

Enter the GreenBox, which aims to make the lowly pizza box both greener and more functional. Made of 100 percent recycled material, the GreenBox can hold a full-sized pizza, but is perforated so that one half can be broken down into four “plates.” The other half forms a refrigerator-scale box for leftover slices. According to Pizza Marketplace, the GreenBox is the brainchild of entrepreneur William Walsh, CEO and founder of ECO Inc.

“(The industry is) mowing down tree after tree for boxes that are used for 45 minutes and then thrown away,” Walsh told Pizza Marketplace. “So I thought, there’s a lot of material to work with (on a pizza box); I wanted to make something intuitive, easy to use, and that had some value. … We made it multifunctional so it was more than just a delivery device, and came up with this design.”

Walsh says 2.4 billion pizza boxes are circulated every year and that most of the “recycled” ones are still include 70 percent virgin wood.