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Just wanted to share my increasing list of uses for shredded paper. I was making paper bricks for burning in the wood stove and finding it a pain to tear up the paper and cardboard before soaking and then taking ages to break down. My partner mentioned there was a lot of paper shredded in her office and could I use it? I found it wonderful for making bricks because it breaks down very quickly and makes very solid dense bricks (I also add sawdust sometimes). I have ended up with more bags of this paper than I can use and now we have some chickens(rescued battery ones) I have found it ideal for their bedding, which when it's changed goes straight onto the compost heap full of chicken poo! Happy chickens and happy compost. This week I have tried using a couple hands full to start the fire in the wood stove because we only occasionally by a newspaper. It burns slowly and easily enough to get the fire going perfectly every time. Any excess that doesn't get used for these things can be soaked and included in the compost heap now and again. I imagine a lot of offices have to shred a lot of paper for security reasons and will have to dispose of it somewhere.

I recently found a paper brick maker in a charity shop for £3! Needless to say I grabbed it. Less of a bargain when you tot up the cost of the big tub I had to buy to put the shredded paper in and the bottle of bleach (which I don't use for anything else) to stop it going mouldy while soaking. Not to mention the hours I've spent ripping up paper. Unfortunately there are no offices round here to filtch shredded paper from.

Still I've found a use for the top of the polytunnel - a plank across the crop bars is currently housing a slowly increasing pile of bricks. I've no idea how long they'll take to dry out. Any ideas?

I've just remembered that my daughter used shredded paper for emergency cat litter on occasion. Maybe we should move this to the "101 uses for" page.

I have used shredded paper under my strawberry plants in place of straw, the blackbirds loved it and made a nest out of it in my grapevine

I had been drying out my 'bricks' in the greenhouse when the weather was warmer but as of a month or so ago it is a waste of time, they just don't dry at all. I haven't used any bleach but the reduced soaking time for shredded paper helps to stop it going off, but they do get a bit smelly if they take too long to dry out. I have tried to make as many bricks as possible during the summer and stopped now. Like the strawberry plants idea, and the '101 uses' although I doubt shredded paper could compete with pallets in that competition!

The top of the polytunnel is still fairly warm as we are continue to have some extremely mild weather and sunny days. I'm not convinced they'll dry, but I only got the brick maker a few weeks ago and I have a small mountainsworth of paper, so I thought I'd have a go.

You can buy little home paper shredders fora tenner or so,they don't use much electricity,and they're brill with newspaper.

I was getting shreded paper from a gvt office, untill they started shredding the documents plastic covers and all

Ass holes

I have dug shredded paper into the ground to break up claggy soil... it looks ugly for a while then disappears. I use a cheap stationery box paper-shredder on all manner of scrap paper. Haven't tried it for chicken bedding yet, but as I am running out of wood-shavings, I think I'll give it a go. And yes it works quite well for firing up the wood-burner.

If anybody is in this area, I'm shredding for Scotland at the moment... At the shop where I work, paperwork has been piling up for decades, and although they keep saying "it's too much to do ourselves, we must get a commercial company to deal with it", I've made a start with our little shredder in the office whenever I have nothing better to do. (They've been saying that, from what I can see, for the last 10 years at least, and nothing ever happens...) Soooo - if anybody wants lots of shredded paper, guaranteed no plastic content, let me know!

I got quite a lot of shredded paper from my office : I use it for the chicken coop and they like it for sleeping and laying their eggs. I also use it in my two -small- homemade paperbrick-makers.

My paper bricks never did dry. We chucked them out eventually. I suppose this would be the time of year to start making them but as it's snowing here at the moment I think I'll wait.

my paper bricks only dried when I put them on a rack above the stove hmmm

Green Aura wrote:My paper bricks never did dry. We chucked them out eventually. I suppose this would be the time of year to start making them but as it's snowing here at the moment I think I'll wait.

Snowing here, too. Glad I've not got anything into the ground yet...

What about paper blocks with oil instead of water?

with oil ? not very eco .... when using water you just need to be patient. I made the blocks not too big (size of a small round tin can and others about the size of a small brick) and put them in my shed to dry. It took some time (weeks, months,...) but when I burned some of them this week all went well and they kept on burning quite a while.