See the update at the end!

Did you know you can compost your shredded paper? It’s great with used coffee grounds! You probably already know that coffee grounds are a valuable addition to your compost bin, but learning about using shredded paper was like an epiphany for me! It feeds my garden, helps avoid adding to the waste stream, and is just a cool way to be more self-sufficient.

The recycling crisis

For the past year or so, there’s been a crisis developing in recycling. Since China decided to stop accepting most American recycling waste, cities and counties are having a hard time figuring out how to process all of the waste coming in every week from our recycling bins. My County even recently said that shredded paper is no longer OK in the bin! That was a surprise, but it might be partly because we used to have to bag our shredded paper, and now they don’t want plastic bags anymore. So, I’ve been wondering how best to deal with my shredded paper, and then I discovered…

Paper = carbon!

I was really pleased to learn that shredded paper is a good carbon source for your compost bin or pile! I’m not an expert in composting, but I’ve been doing it for several years. I know you’re supposed to try for 25-30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. It’s hard to be precise, but I just try to go by how the compost looks, whether it’s heating up, and how fast it’s decomposing.

I don’t use a fancy tumbler bin — most of my compost is done in this homemade little “stall” I made from scrap wood left over from some home projects. I’ve been using that for grass clippings and the huge amount of leaves I get from my large maple tree each fall. Honestly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to it, so it’s been kind of a slow burn.
Right now there’s only about six inches of compost remaining after the decomposition process and using some of it in the garden.

My little paper/coffee/kitchen-scraps compost bin experiment

For my new shredded paper project, I decided to start small and just use a large plastic garden pot, which is just a little bigger than a five-gallon bucket. It has holes in the bottom for drainage, but no holes on the sides, so today, I realized it had been retaining a bit of moisture (I water it once in a while and loosely place a piece of burlap on the top of the composting material). I’m also putting kitchen scraps, including some hard stuff like avocado pits and skins, banana peels, etc. I’ve been impressed that those scraps really are decomposing pretty quickly!

But it turns out I’m getting a little help in the composting process! Mealworms! Or some kind of grub, at least. Discovering them was a little icky, when I dug my bare hands deep into the bottom of the bin to turn things over with some new paper I added, and I realized the bottom was a little stinky and had plenty of these little guys wriggling around. Oh well — searching online tells me they won’t harm anything, and the beetles or flies they turn into are also likely harmless to my garden, so I’m happy to have them munching down on my avocado pits.

Are you ready to try composting paper? I think you should!

Update – it works!

Check out this beautiful compost that came from my paper/coffee grounds experiment. It looks great, smells good, and I’m looking forward to doing more of this. It was mostly composted in about a month, I think. Maybe best to wait two months, although I was continually adding more kitchen scraps, which may have slowed me down.