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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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