Composting & Worms

[Noa Villela]

I am building a compost bin for my kitchen scraps and am planning on using red worms. I tend to be a little paranoid and shred 75% of my junk mail, I know that worms will do a good job with newspaper but will they also dismantle my financial information? Is there any chance of poisoning the worms/fish with the ink? The majority of the compost will be of the wilted vegetation variety though. What are your opinions, or advice?

[Daniel]

I don't have a worm compost bin (yet), so I cannot comment directly on this, but I use my shredded paper as a fire-starter for my wood burning stove. Smokes a little more than just starting with wood chips, but saves me money on buying fire-starter and my financial information is burned to ashes.

I'd like to know what people think about using it in a worm bin though, since I may make one in the near future. I would personally think it would work fine, especially since most bins I know recommend newspaper lining, and newspaper has ink also, but then again I shred receipts and window envelopes, so it would be plastic with the paper which doesn't seem a great idea for the worms.

[Converse]

  Most shredded paper is just fine for using in a redworm composting bin.  What you want to avoid is the shiny slick stuff that most magazines are printed on, and also some advertisements use this type of paper too.  We avoid this because this paper goes through a different chemical process and is not best for the redworms.  Most inks are carbon/soy based so the printing is not a worry.

   We run a commercial scale redworm farm, and have great luck with shredded paper, and card board too.   The wilted vegetation is perfect to feed the redworms.   We feed the redworms to the fish in our AP system and to all our farm fowl.  All doing well!

 

 Hope this is helpful.  Send me a private message if you have more specific questions.  I will gladly help out.

 

 - Converse