Composting question - is printed paper a problem?

Hi all

We have been composting our garden and kitchen waste for nearly a year now, and for 'browns' we have been using newspaper, brown cardboard and shredded paper. The paper we use is bits of paper that we have written on, bank statements and letters. We make sure that the paper isn't shiny, doesn't have any plastic bits etc but I forgot about the ink - is it safe to put printed paper in the compost bin, in other words are all inks relatively safe for composting? I reckon that they are water soluble and so will be fine (they will leak out) but my girlfriend isn't so sure.

Does anybody know if inks are safe to compost??

Paddy

 

I certainly hope so, my garden has years worth of the stuff everywhere-shredded.

 

As long as the paper is shredded/ripped up, there is no problem.:gnthb:

 

Paper printed with toner? is that basically just soot?

 

Id be interested in this as well as I've just bought a new laser printer and the amount of "test pages" it prints out

 

I wd not worry too much about ink from printers which is in minimal amounts anyway, but glossy magazines and profesionally printed papers are printed with pretty nasty solvent inks that are oil based and not very different from varnish. These I would avoid, as they arenot really biodegrdable (?) and the local bacteria may find them pretty indigestible.

 

Hello,

Thanks for the replies, all very reassuring! Rest assured I don't ever compost glossy paper. By 'professionally printed papers' what do you mean exactly? Would bank statements / phone bills etc fall into this category, as we do compost those.

Paddy

 

I believe that black inks, such as toner, are essentially soot and quite harmless. The bright colours in glossy magazines used to be salts of heavy metals such as cadmium (bright yellow) and nickel (blues and greens), but I believe that nowadays there are virtually all organic dyes. Heavy metal salts are expensive and poisonous - so I still avoid composting any high quality printed material just in case.