Sometimes when I delve into an ADHD obsession as I am with the recycled paper briquettes I like to check in on myself as to WHY this is an okay idea to explore.
First, it’s not costing me anything- I already own some 5 gallon buckets, a caulking gun, and a paint mixer. The paper and card is coming in with the mail and other packages. I already own the paper shredder.* I did buy some empty caulking tubes to use as my forms. Mainly what this costs me is my time. Much of the time spent is down time-soaking the paper for days. Paper soaks starting on a Monday and then gets processed into briquettes on a Saturday.
In terms of the shredded paper, it has many uses and in the past I’ve collected paper from my old job to put into my compost and to use as a weed block. But it’s also a prime component of paper mâché clay, papercrete, and other art media. It’s useful is what I’m saying.
Toilet paper tubes, are better reused, IMO as seedling pots for seeds that have longer tap roots or don’t like to be traditionally transplanted. This is how I will be reusing them in the future.
Coffee grounds are used as a top dressing in my garden from spring to fall, however in the winter we do tend to thrown them out. So I think adding them to my briquettes is a good use of the used coffee grounds.
I do not think I could heat my house with these even if I spent entire weekends making them. For now I see them as a way to get my pellet stove to kick on faster and as something I’ll use in my solo stove/charcoal grill. I am interested in exploring if they will work in my camping twig stove and what sort of burn time I’d see in the twig stove. I’m sure they will burn but it’s an interesting thought if one can burn long and hot enough in a twig stove to boil water or cook some spam if it would be truly useful while out backpacking or camping. Alternatively in a power outage a meal could be cooked.**
I am very much wedded to my alcohol burners for camping and backpacking so I do not see these briquettes as taking their place. Now, if I could distill my own bioethanol I’d be onto something. Is it illegal to distill alcohol for burning? It is for consumption. That is an interesting side quest on this fixation of mine.
Back to the recycled paper. In my area I cannot recycle shredded paper only whole paper. Given the number of times I’ve had people swiping credit card offers from my recycle bin and stealing my or my partner’s identity I have started to shred all the credit card offers anyway, now I I simply make sure that the windows from the envelopes have been removed before shredding.
It seems somewhat paranoid to suggest that composting or burning my credit card offers and other bills helps to secure my identity from theft, but here I am suggesting it.
The difference here from what I normally do is that I’m also shredding cardboard to go into the mix. A fair amount of what I am shredding is cardboard boxes.
This is also serving as a way for me to look REALLY closely at my consumerism. I am not liking what I am seeing. Needing to shred every box really makes me consider if I need to be buying things or getting things for review via the Amazon Vine program. I’m asking myself “Do I need that? Do I want that? Do we have room for that?” I’m also letting go of a few things that I have largely forgotten about- beer and wine brewing supplies. This one hurts a bit. I really enjoy making beer, wine and mead BUT my current medications for type 2 means that I can’t drink alcohol without consequences. A hangover I can recover from in a few days, drastically low blood sugar ends up with pendulum swings for at least a day and I end up with headaches and feeling generally pretty terrible. So no booze for me.
I have removed all the beer and wine bottles and several fermentation chambers. I’m looking at clearing out the carboys now. This is a rough one because they were hard to source and never utilized to their full potential. I am holding onto the wide mouth fermentation chambers for pickles, kimchi, and kombucha. I will continue to ferment.
I wrote this before, but the paper briquettes started out as simple coiled cardboard to see how it would burn in my solo stove. Ultimately that is my goal- to use these in my solo stove instead of buying pellets or just burning twigs. I like the idea that I’m making enormous pellets from free stuff that I’m putting a small amount of effort. If one 6 gallon bucket of pulp makes 29.5 briquettes plus a few larger fist sized balls, well, that’s probably 5 burns. 5 hours of fun chilling with my partner in the backyard as we grill some food and chill with a book.
Another use is for heating the greenhouse to keep it warm on cold spring or fall nights. This also links to my thinking about “can a single briquette boil water” and how much water can it boil? This becomes important when warming a green house. I cannot leave a fire burning for hours unattended. That would be very much illegal. BUT I can bring a gallon or two of water to a boil and leave it to cool in the greenhouse. That along with the fire itself happening in the green house would create enough warmth to keep plants doing okay. Something to consider.
Are these recycled paper briquettes worth the effort? Not for heating a home. Perhaps a tiny home in a much warmer climate. But for my uses I’m mainly interested in them for the purposes of NOT burning pellets in my solo stove. I’m also interested in them for emergency purposes. They are also quite useful for getting a fire started, if they are loosely compressed by hand. Otherwise they require some effort and work to start up. They work terrifically well in a solo stove or other secondary burning type of stove.
*The paper shredder was a curbside find a few years back that has gotten hardly any use.
** For some reason I have been thinking about the 1998 ice storm that knocked out power across Maine and parts of the NorthEast. My roommates and I were without power for 4 days. My parents didn’t have power for 2 weeks and one of my aunts didn’t have power for a month. We were lucky and had a fireplace and the ability to get into Bangor to buy boxes of recycled firelogs and other wood for burning. Our apartment was cold but we heated cans of soup in the fire and over candles. I suspect this has something to do with my obsession with alcohol stoves and stands. At one point a bunch of our friends who were also without power came over and we stayed warm together. It was a miserable and cold 4 days. d