Composting Office Paper

[Max]

Alright Stephen, enough prevaricating.

In this post,

a guy who works in the composting biz professionally, with cities and counties, says you're wrong.

I said, "Stephen, hey this guy seems to know his stuff and he says different, colored paper is OK to compost. How do you know it isn't?" Your reply above seems only to say, "because I know."

One more time, HOW do you know?

[Pen]

It only takes about 1 month to compost a few inches of paper in a worm composter. I've figured that if the worms are alive and healthy then the compost can't be too bad.

[Anonymous]

I am relying on research conducted by others (read

for details). I don't make a practice of using my compost pile to get rid of excess PCB's but I feel I can rely upon it to dispatch all the contaminants it is likely to see in normal use.

It's not a fetish, it's a garden on the edge of a major city.

Bill

[Anonymous]

I AM careful about what I read. And that's why I'd like you to define what you mean by "organic waste from the top of the food chain". If you are referencing human waste (as it seems you might be), then I think you are fully mistaken.

Even if there are heavy metals in the ink (a point still open to contention), there is darned little ink on a page and only a TINY fraction of that would be the actual offending metal. Moreover, composting does bind up elemental toxins into safer compounds ... they, after all, are the building block of 'molecular' toxins.

I have a great deal of confidence in the effectiveness of the microbiology of a compost pile. While I would not lace it with strychnine and then dine on it directly, that's because I don't deliberately eat compost directly under any circumstances. I would be completely willing to dose a fresh pile, compost it as per my usual custom and then use it in my garden after a 2 year aging period.

Bill

[Kevin Cutlip]

The office paper where I work is great for compost...Almost as much %^#@ as Black Kow Manure....1.0-1.0-1.0.

[Salty Thumb]

Anonymous wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Every little bit adds up.

I'm curious as to what "safer" molecules are created from lead (or any other "heavy" metals) by composting.

What a great philosopher's stone that would be ... garbage in, gold out. Unfortunately I still have questions about the transmutablity of many of the reactants.

Might be marginally off-topic, but I saw this in another group: [Article] French peat bog reveals thousands of years of mining pollution.

$ [e-mail]%3E "Once lead is locked up in organic material such as peat, it tends to stay put rather than being washed away by water. "

[Cricket Rakita]

wonderful i'll print this and compost it