Using paper in the garden

Paper pots
Paper plant pots, for seedlings

A blog post on the Guardian website this morning says that only 1/3 of the paper used in Britain is currently recycled. The benefits of recycling paper are well known – preserving forests, cutting down on methane emissions from landfill and saving energy, water and pollution. Recycling is not without it’s controversies, of course, but in general it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t be doing it.

We are very lucky because our local council has a good recycling scheme and we put our waste paper in our green bin each week and watch it being taken away for recycling. Considering we don’t take a daily newspaper (we tend to get our news online), refuse free newspapers, have signed up for the Mailing Preference Service to ditch junk mail and have a largely paperless home office, it’s amazing how much waste paper we still produce.

Some of it is recycled in the garden. Newspaper, when we get it, is a valuable resource in this household. We use it to line the nest box in the Eglu, making it much easier to clean the chickens out. I also use some of it to make paper pots for seedlings.

Sensitive paper waste, with personal details on it, is all shredded. We use some of the shredded paper for the chicken’s nest box. When we clean them out, the resulting mess goes on the compost heap. The rest of the shredded paper goes directly onto the compost heap, or into the worm bin, adding valuable carbon and dry material to balance nitrogen-rich plant and kitchen waste. I’m also considering using it as a mulch – a small-scale trial this summer is in order.

If you’ve got more ways of making use of ‘waste’ paper, particularly in the garden, then I’d love to hear them. In the meantime, we’ll carry on recycling and closing the loop by making sure that the paper products we do buy are made from recycled paper.

My latest article on Helium is also on this theme – have a look at ‘The importance of recycling and composting in the garden’.

© Copyright Emma Cooper, 2008. All rights reserved.

Posted 15 February 2008, 16:20.  

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