PARIS, Nov 11 — While fast-food restaurants in France will no longer be authorised to serve customers dining-in with single-use packaging as of January 1, a Belgian entrepreneur has found a solution to drive down waste from one mainstay of the takeout industry: pizza.

Pizza is a go-to choice for fans watching football games or at-home movie nights. Indeed, some 30 billion pizzas are eaten worldwide each year. The French are the champions, ahead of their Italian neighbours, who invented the dish. The former consume 10 kilos while the latter eat half that amount.

But once your pizza is ordered, it comes in a cardboard box, picked up for takeout or delivery, and only serving to carry your four-cheese or margherita before it’s cut up and devoured.

And that’s it! The packaging very soon ends up in the trash. The ecological disaster is easy to imagine, considering consumers’ insatiable appetite for this easy and fun-to-share meal.

Faced with this fact, a young Belgian entrepreneur decided to reduce this mountain of waste by designing a reusable pizza box. He chose polypropylene for the manufacturing, a material that can endure multiple uses before being recycled.

While it is another form of plastic, it emits no toxic substances when incinerated. It is already being used in the food industry because polypropylene has high heat resistance and is suitable for microwave use.

The invention, called Bwat, consists of a tray with grooves in it to prevent the pizza dough from getting soft. A lid, equipped with several small holes, ensures that the pizza stays warm.

According to the brand, the creation is even more efficient than a cardboard box, since, after ten minutes inside, the pizza remains 10?C hotter. The Bwat also folds and is dishwasher safe. Count EUR25 per reusable box, available to buy online. — ETX Studio