The OP is alluding to the fact that growing forests, cutting them down, and then burying the resulting paper should use less energy then recycling and produce less toxic waste products due to fewer chemicals. Such activity has a strong possibility of being a carbon negative process.

It may be better for the environment to sustainably harvest trees to produce cardboard then to recycle other paper products.

This works conceptually if you are sustainably replanting forests to feed your paper mill. In reality, your mileage may very and here in Canada, plenty of paper mills are still running off of irreplaceable primary forest.

Please learn how to use the words than/then correctly...

Pizza boxes?

A lot of paper is coated in clays, waxes, or plastics, and many inks might make paper unsuitable for use in food grade products like pizza boxes, without heavy processing.

Shipping boxes, maybe. If the structural properties of the resulting board are OK.

But most post-consumer paper is unusable for one reason or another. Recycling of industrial packaging is a slightly different story.

Are New York pizza boxes food grade? Most New York pizza isn't even food grade.

Maybe not that .99c-a-slice garbage but there are some damn good pies to be had here in NYC for sure! Lucali, Totonno's, Joe's... some of the best you will ever have.

Some books and newspapers are printed on 100% recycled paper. If recycled paper is only used for pizza boxes in the US, that's a US thing.

Newspapers are almost entirely waste, by volume of paper. Creating waste to receive low quality recycling is accounting nonsense.

And lest this sound myopic! At least in Portland, the pizza boxes can be put into composting bins, including the plant-waste bins that we put out next to garbage bins.

So the paper does, eventually, go to the landfill and become sequestered in the typical fashion.

How much carbon does feeding the pizza boxes to the composting process release into the air, as a percentage of total carbon present in the pizza boxes at rest (ignoring construction costs)?

I’ve only just started doing this - but my understanding is that the lids go into compost. The bottoms shouldn’t because the grease turns to a yuck sludge in compost bins.

Do you mean compost collection bins, or home composting bins?

If you live in an area that collects material for industrial composting you should 100% put the grease coated parts of the cardboard in your compost collection bin.

Yes sorry I’m talking about home composting.

It varies by area. Here's the guidelines for Portland [0]; it seems that "Home" "FOOD SCRAPS" bins may have pizza boxes in them, as long as wax paper and other inserts are removed. Incidentally, mentally traversing the pizzerias I go to, I think that the only inserts that any of them add are pizza savers [1].

[0] https://www.portland.gov/bps/garbage-recycling/compost-what-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_saver

I think the point is that, by recycling, one has to use energy to transport used paper, process paper using machinery, store it, use chemicals which are pollutants themselves, etc. All this instead of just throwing out the paper.

Garbage isn't "just" thrown out, it also has to be transported and stored. We'd still want to sort efficiently recyclable aluminum out of the garbage before it's sent to landfill, so ideally there would be some processing as well.

If you're replacing your paper with paper from trees, you have to do all that anyway (transport, processing, storage, chemicals), and on top of that you have all the energy of getting the raw materials in the first place.

I'm not too sure on the details of how that is done, but I imagine it involves driving huge trucks into forests, cutting trees with machines, stripping and cutting the trees, and transporting wood to industrial areas.

It has to be more CO2 efficient to recycle.