Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

hey all,

i just got myself a cheap shredder. i am wondering if plain paper is ok to compost or are there chemical in it that should be avoided? i seem to recall its the colour ink that should be avoided and black and white is ok.

i also wonder if compost using paper can still be considered organic.

any idea?

thanks

Here in North America I believe most inks have to be non toxic now even color (as a baby can easily stick paper in their mouth.) I expect you guys have switched over to soy based inks as well. I compost paper all the time! It makes a good carbon material to mix in with your High Nitrogen materials. The glossy stuff tends to break down slower so you might want to avoid that.

As to the Organic, I suppose it depends on how strict you want to be. There are probably some chemicals used on/in paper that would not be organic when used directly in the garden but after the composting process the impact is bound to be minimal.

Shredded paper is often used for worm bedding but I find it clumps up alot and I like shredded corrugated cardboard for my worm bedding better. The shredded paper and junk mail (except for the plastic windows) go into the humanure buckets here so we p(#*$&) on it. This reduces the amount of sawdust we need to get for the buckets.

soy based inks are hard to find here - I was looking at it for some colour fliers I wanted to do a year and a half ago and there wre only two in my city that did it , and the cost was almost twice as much .

Lower end businesses too - junky looking places , once the bigger / more mainstream printers start using it ( cross my fingers they will ) then the price will no doubt come down

take that with a grain of salt though - were in Perth , we only just found out that theres such a thing as "internets"

thanks for the reply TCLynx,

i was coming from a certification point of view. it makes sense that paper be composted as its such a valuable resource to just throw away. the carbon can be used as a free energy source.

i just wonder how the certifiers might view it.

it certainly follows the organic principals.

so would that mean that in Perth composing paper is a potential contaminator of chemicals?

i have used news paper as worm bedding and they certainly didn't seem to be affected by it negatively. the reverse actually. worms have to be a pretty good indicator of chems. the canary of organics.

no - quite the opposite , as far as Ive read last wek - worms are awesome at breaking down armfull chemicals

I think its more the inks that we have to be worried about here - paper is coloured with dye , paper is printed on with ink

not many printers in perth using soy based ink , but coloured paper is the same everywhere

From a certification point of view, that is of course a different story. I suppose one would need to find out from the certification agency what the exact rules are. Compost and composted manures are (in my mind) quite organic but I don't know if certification requires that the materials going into the compost and composted manures be certified organic too. How far up the chain must one go?

Good luck in your research!