Sometimes, major municipal nuisances can be solved by thinking outside the box — or, as California's Bay Area news outlet KQED reported, by thinking through the box.
Anyone who has found themselves in possession of an empty pizza box in public will be instantly familiar with the problem officials in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood faced.
The area, home to San Francisco's "Little Italy," boasts several beloved pizza joints, many of which are central to the city's northern waterfront area, Fisherman's Wharf.
According to KQED, residents and visitors long struggled with how to dispose of large pizza boxes after enjoying both the pie and the outdoor scenery. Diners were forced to attempt the utterly futile task of folding or squishing the sturdy boxes to fit into regular trash cans.
Predictably, this led to public recreation areas like Washington Square Park being awash in pizza boxes at the end of each weekend.
Stacks of pizza boxes near unsuitable public waste cans could be described as "desire paths," unofficial routes carved by people or wildlife that illustrate a direction with less resistance. In urban planning, this behavior sometimes leads to the "paving" of those paths.
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Instead of fining pizza eaters for littering, North Beach is testing a novel solution: highly visible, larger trash bins emblazoned with "Pizza Box Drop Off," box-sized slots, and arrows.
According to Director of Public Works Carla Short, municipal departments were just as frustrated as pizza buyers, as the latter group's attempts to shoehorn pizza boxes into standard round collection bins clogged the boxes and exacerbated loose litter.
"Then that can starts to overflow, and then we end up with trash around it and that spreads … we want our city to look its best. We want to make sure that we can make it easy for [people] to do the right thing," Short explained.
In addition to potentially solving the pizza box problem, the solution wasn't costly for the city. Recology — a local firm founded by Italian immigrants in the 1800s, focused on minimizing waste by reclaiming usable goods — designed and fabricated the bins at no cost.
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$200 or more 💰 "In North Beach, pizza, that's serious business," Recology CEO Sal Coniglio told KQED.
Short said the program remained in a pilot phase, but added that the city could adopt the pizza drop-off boxes permanently based on public sentiment and efficacy.
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