I’ve been weighing the “worth” of the recycled paper and other styles of briquettes. Worth meaning time spent to make, cost and energy to create, and final usefulness.
Time spent is complicated because much of the time is down time- shred paper, put the paper into the bucket, cover with water and then wait 5 to 7 days for the paper and card to absorb the water. Then spend some time, 10 minutes or so beating the pulp. Then partially strain the pulp before molding. The molding and pressing is the most labor intensive part of the process. Before molding time spent is roughly a half hour to an hour, depending on the paper shredding. Because molding and pressing take time, I suspect it would be far more efficient to press several briquettes at once. I should time how long it takes to make a single briquette as well as how long it takes to make 5 to get an average. It’s not a short amount of time.
Time spent is the biggest hurdle here. If the process could be automated and a great deal of materials were to hand, the briquettes could be made faster and more easily. But through expending energy.
In terms of cost to make, it’s not expensive. The raw materials are free and the other materials (other than the cordless caulking gun) were already in my possession and repurposed for this project.
Usefulness is a tricky metric. This is entirely subjective. These briquettes are made all over the world for use in cooking and heating. They allow some people to create small businesses around the creation and sale. For my purposes it’s probably more useful to just buy a cheap bag of pellets and burn those in my solo stove/charcoal grill. You can now buy a bag of pellets at Dollar Tree specifically for the grill. A 40lb bag is available at Lowes and other places for around $7. I can fill my “charcoal grill” 15 or 20 times with 40lbs of pellets.
However, I’m already shredding a great deal of my waste paper, and I cannot recycle it and I cannot compost or use it all in my garden beds. Being able to make a few dozen briquettes perfectly sized for my charcoal grill means that I am able to use up much more of this waste paper than I could in the past. So there are levels to the usefulness. If I were attempting to heat my home with these it would take me a month to make enough briquettes. I’d likely have to bring in additional waste paper and resources to make that many briquettes.
This also brings me to other uses for the waste paper. It can be used to make paper mâché clay, it would make a delightfully lumpy version of it and the paper would need to be strained a lot to create the correct texture. I also suspect that it would be prone to molding so it would need to be used quickly and made in batches. Another use is papercrete and this too would need to have the pulp drained very well. Papercrete is an avenue of interest, I think it would be fascinating to make planters with it. Papercrete would require a whole set of new tools that paper mâché clay and the briquettes don’t need.
Generally speaking for heating a house, unless it’s a tiny home and you have a way to automate this process this is IMO not really “worth it.” Yes the materials are low cost or free but you’d have to have a huge chunk of free time available to make enough to heat even a tiny space. For my purposes, of fun and amusement, and generally playing with fire, these are worth it. I might make enough for a few dozen burns over the spring, summer and fall of this upcoming year, but I’ve generally learned that the production of making these isn’t particularly efficient. I do enjoy it, which I suppose is something else to consider.