Composting shredded paper in King County

Found this forgotten in the drafts folder. Apologies. Information is still good.
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I once heard a rumor that the shreds from personal paper shredders are not supposed to go in your curbside recycling bin. The fibers are apparently too short to recycle into higher quality recycled paper, so there's no resale market for them, hence no financial incentive to recycle. Plus including them in your curbside recycling bin renders the rest of your bin unusable. And what happens then? It gets landfilled with the regular trash, wasting both your effort and the resources.

My housemate has been decrapping his personal records, shredding the documents and things like unsolicited credit card offers with a newly purchased cross-cut shredder. The amount of shreds is simply not to be believed, and the thought of all that paper going into a landfill hurt my heart. If it wasn't recylable, surely it was a least compostable. I decided to get to the bottom of it.

King County Solid Waste Division has an interactive guide on its web site that tells you how/where to dispose of specific material:

http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/index.asp

The guidance for shredded paper was incomplete, and did not mention composting. Fortunately, I'm stubborn. I contacted them with my question by email and received this in reply on November 23, 2010:

"Yes, you can layer your shredded paper, food scraps and food soiled paper and yard debris in your curbside yard waste cart.  If you have a worm bin at home, shredded paper coming from paper which does not have a lot of ink on it, makes a excellent bedding material."

Our region is to be commended for having had the political will to make household recycling available and economically viable. Such programs are by no means universal in the U.S. But it's up to us to make sure that the recyclables are properly sorted, i.e. not degraded by inclusion of non-recylable material. This "Quick'n'Dirty" cheat sheet is available from the City of Seattle. Won't it look good on the refrigerator!

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WWJD?

When a friend hands you Pak Choi ....make lemonade. No, that doesn't sound right. Braise it? Grill it? Stir fry it? What would Julia do?

My best friends, Rick and Barbara, are gardeners with the mad skills, dedication and the patience it takes to grow vegetables of gem-like beauty, and complex taste. And they're generous too. In seasons past, I've managed to come away from our gatherings with armloads of fresh produce that the local grocery store simply cannot match.

This 4th of July was no exception. We're sitting out in the backyard enjoying the sunny afternoon and Barbara casually reaches over into their "Grow Camp" mini greenhouse, plucks a perfect Pak Choi out of the dirt and presents it to me. Made me feel like I'd just been made Miss America oddly. The pak choi is now glowing palely at me from the sink drainer, and I'm fantasizing about braising it in something low-cal and savory for lunch. (Imagine Homer noises here.)

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P.S. I think R&B are onto my tomato-deprived act. Looking hungry and pathetic only takes you so far until the suggestion is made, gently, that perhaps you should consider growing tomatoes yourself. (Did I mention that some folks call me "Purple Thumbed Les?") But six plants are currently flowering in the backyard so perhaps there's hope. They are Early Girl (2), Roma (2), Sweet 100 Cherry (1) and Sungold Cherry (1).

Well yes. It has been awhile.

Seems like I've been absent forever, but it's really only been about 6 months. In January, I decided to take advantage of being at home and get my old deck rebuilt into something more satisfactory and structurally competent. As it happens, this became an opportunity to relandscape as well. Blogging? Fuhgeddaboutit. No time.

My goals for the project have been twofold: firstly, to rebuild the deck as a three-season outdoor room, and secondly, to replant the lawn (mostly moss) as an organic urban farm and low maintenance native plant area. The deck with partial roof was completed just a month ago, and the potager garden is laid out, planted and beginning to flourish. There's even the start of an organic compost heap.

Pavement and native plantings are on-hold until my mood realigns with my ambition. On the positive side of the ledger: I've lost some weight and my arms look positively ripped from all the digging. On the negative side, I've got tendonitis in both my wrists and an elbow. S'okay. I can live with a wrist brace and bare earth until Fall. And pavements need to be planned anyway; finally going to make use of all the mismatched paver and tile remnants the former owner stashed around here. It'll be artsy.

Nature is not sleeping meanwhile, though the cool, wet Seattle Spring has set plant growth back as much as 6 weeks according to some. Can I possibly win the race to get the weeds pulled before they go to seed this year? I'm certainly going to try, bad wrists notwithstanding. And if the sun will ever shine for more than a day at a time, I may get the new construction weather sealed too. I think I may be gone awhile some more.

His Lordship cleaned something. I am thrilled!

Princess Andrew can be alot of fun, which is why I keep him around. (Okay, the free tech support is nice too.) But he is for sure a slob with hoarder tendencies. And the condition of his private bath, so heinous that I complained about it a year ago, was so olfactorally worse with this year's return of warm weather that I started closing the door to his suite and hanging masking odor air fresheners in the hallway between our bedrooms. Guess that finally got through to him because he not only admitted it was bad, he decided to do something about it--finally!

After an hour of vigorous scrubbing and mopping, the critters were dead and all was inoffensive once again. It's probably somehow perverse that I'd rather inhale bleach than mildew smells, but I made a point of praising the cloud of disinfectant wafting from his bathroom window. Now that the backlog of crud is gone, will he find his way and continue to wipe things down once in awhile? Stay tuned!