COVINGTON, Ky. — The city of Covington is thinking outside the box to address a trash issue it's been dealing with.

By giving people a new way to get rid of their pizza boxes, the city is hoping it makes for less trash on the streets.

Matthew Szekeresh said he’s proud to live in the MainStrasse area of Covington and loves walking down for a bite to eat, except for one aspect.

“With so many people coming in to eat food here in Covington, and especially now, eating things on the go, we’ve definitely seen an increase in trash piling up. And one of the things that you really did notice was pizza boxes. You got square boxes, round garbage cans. It just wasn’t working,” he said.

It’s something the city’s solid waste and recycling coordinator, Sheila Fields, has been monitoring closely.

“We were seeing a lot of issues with overflowing trash cans, and as we observed and monitored that issue, we discovered that, a lot of the time, it was because a pizza box was blocking the hole, the opening of the trash can. And without folks taking that extra effort to bend or fold the pizza box in half to get it through the hole, we continued to see overflowing trash cans,” Fields said. “It contributes to the litter on the street. And we’re all trying to beautify our neighborhoods. It looks trashy. It’s unsightly.”

The city started brainstorming about how to solve the problem and came up with the idea of a lid with a hole wide enough for a pizza box.

“We found that pizza box receptacles were actually a thing,” Fields said.

Rather than try to fit new lids to its existing trash cans, the city designed its own pizza box receptacles, partnering with the Residents of MainStrasse Association and Rumpke Waste and Recycling.

Right now there are three of them in the MainStrasse area.

“I wasn’t creative enough to think about square trash cans. To be honest, I just thought, 'Well they should pick up the trash more often.' But you would notice, there would just be stacks and stacks of pizza boxes,” Szekeresh said. “I’m really excited that the city not only listened to the concerns of the neighborhood, but thought of creative solutions.”

Rumpke comes and picks up the boxes to be recycled, but not before a city employee checks them.

Fields said before people throw their boxes away, they can help the city by checking them themselves.

“We want them to ensure that the inside doesn’t have any debris in it,” she said.

The boxes also can’t be too greasy.

“If the bottom is about a third stained, it’s still acceptable,” Fields said.

The receptacles were just installed last week, but the early returns have been encouraging.

“We checked them Saturday morning, and this one was full,” Fields said. “It did its job its first weekend.”

The city has a grant to add three more of the receptacles. It’s also planning to partner with pizzerias to attach instructions to pizza boxes.