Are egg cartons recyclable?
It depends
Depends entirely which of the three kinds you have. Gray molded pulp: yes, or compost it. Clear plastic: usually, but check. Foam: no.
Follow it down the line
Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.
The material · Sometimes
Is the material recyclable?
Three completely different materials are sold as the same product, whether the shop calls it an egg carton, an egg crate or an egg container, and the packaging gives you no reason to think of them separately. Gray molded pulp is paper fiber. Clear cartons are usually PET, the same plastic as a drinks bottle. Foam cartons are expanded polystyrene. The right answer changes with each, so the first step is identifying which one is in your hand. The pulp ones are what the paper industry calls molded fiber containers, and egg cartons are the first example it reaches for. Worth knowing that paper fiber does not last forever: AF&PA counts recycled fibers as good for five to seven passes before they are too short to make anything new. That finite number is why composting a pulp carton is a reasonable end for it rather than a waste, and it is also why the things that ruin molded fiber for a mill are worth avoiding, foils and wet strength resins above all. Clear cartons are not merely 'plastic'. They are PET thermoforms, which the recyclers treat as a separate baled commodity from bottles and jars, with egg cartons named in the specification alongside clamshells, cups, lids and deli containers. That specification also says something revealing about the difficulty: every thermoform in the bale has to be optically sorted as PET specifically, and no thermoform may arrive from any other sorting station, precisely to keep lookalike PS, PLA and PVC out of it. The whole bale is allowed no more than six percent contamination, and plastic foam is on the list of contaminants not allowed at all. The three kinds of carton are not just different, they actively spoil each other.
Sources: APR Model Bale Specification: PET thermoforms, AF&PA: Design Guidance for Recyclability
The facility · Sometimes
Will a sorting facility recover it?
Pulp cartons run with paper without difficulty. Clear PET cartons are thin-walled and awkwardly shaped, which makes them more marginal on a sorting line than the plastic itself would suggest. Some programs take them in the ordinary recycling cart, others do not, and the split is about the facility rather than the material. San Jose, for one, sorts them as plastic #1. The reason the shape matters is the order a sorting line works in. It separates by size and shape before it ever identifies a polymer: screens send flat, two-dimensional items one way and let three-dimensional containers drop the other, air classifiers split light from heavy, magnets and eddy currents take the metals, and only then do optical sorters read the plastic with near infrared light. A shallow, thin-walled, largely empty carton is an awkward thing to put through the first step, because it is neither convincingly flat like paper nor convincingly solid like a bottle, and a lid or a crushed carton under about three inches in two dimensions can drop through the screens into the residue before any optical sorter gets a look at it. Foam fails for the reasons foam always fails: too light to sort, and it shatters on the line into pieces far below anything the screens can hold.
Sources: San Jose Recycles: egg cartons (plastic), Atlantic Packaging: Deep Dive, Sorting Recyclables at a Modern MRF
Your curbside program · Varies
Will your curbside program take it?
Programs broadly agree on the ends and disagree in the middle. Pulp cartons are widely accepted; foam is widely refused. Clear plastic is the coin flip. Cuyahoga County accepts paper cartons curbside or at a mixed paper drop-off, says plainly that plastic ones depend on your recycling processor, and tells you to reuse or bin the foam. Omaha accepts cardboard, paper and clear plastic in the cart, and routes foam into a separate hard-to-recycle bag program rather than pretending it belongs in the ordinary stream. In some states the foam question has been settled above the program's head. Washington banned foam egg cartons outright, alongside foam meat and produce trays and block packaging, rather than keep trying to collect them. Where that is the case the carton is not a recycling decision at all, because the shop cannot sell you one. The condition every program repeats is the boring one that actually gets people: the carton has to be empty, clean and dry. Cuyahoga spells it out, no egg residue. A carton that held a cracked egg is food-soiled paper, and food-soiled paper is not recyclable in any of the three materials.
Sources: CuyahogaRecycles: egg cartons, Omaha Recycling Guide: egg cartons, Washington State Department of Ecology: Expanded polystyrene ban
What you need to do
- Identify the material first: pulp, clear plastic or foam
- Empty, clean and dry. A carton used to hold cracked eggs is contaminated and is no longer recyclable
- Check your program specifically for clear plastic; this is the one that genuinely varies
- Keep foam out of the bin regardless
- Do not stack the three types together 'to save space'. Foam is a contaminant the PET bale is not allowed to carry at all
Where else it can go
Compost the pulp ones
Molded pulp composts quickly, especially torn up, and Cuyahoga County suggests shredding them into a home system as brown carbon material. This is often the better route anyway: paper fiber is good for five to seven passes and a pulp carton has already spent some of them, so a mill gains less from it than the compost heap does.
Pulp only. Foam and plastic do not compost, whatever the carton is shaped like.
Give them back
Farmers' market egg sellers and anyone keeping backyard hens will usually take clean cartons of any of the three types and reuse them directly, which is the only route that does anything useful with a foam one.
Clean and undamaged only. Nobody wants a carton that held a cracked egg.
Seed starting
Pulp cartons work as seedling trays and can be cut up and planted straight into the ground, where they break down around the roots.
Store take-back for foam, where it exists
A few programs route foam into a separate stream rather than the cart. Omaha's hard-to-recycle bag program takes empty foam cartons that its curbside collection refuses.
Rare, and specific to the program. Not a general answer for foam.
Common mistakes
- Treating all egg cartons as one thing because they are all the same shape
- Putting cracked eggs back in the carton and then recycling it
- Assuming a foam carton is fine because the pulp version is
- Reading the #1 on a clear carton as a promise. It is the same resin as a bottle, but it is baled and sorted as a different commodity, and whether your facility captures it is a separate question from what it is made of
- Feeling bad about composting a pulp carton. Paper fiber gets five to seven lives and this one is late in the run, so the compost heap is a fair end rather than a loss