OT document shredding with a garden mulcher

Between business and home I accumulate a large amount of paper that I have shredded.
Our state has free shredding every couple months that I in the past have been able to make.(usually 4 large trash bags full)
This year I've had some additional responsibilities that make getting to the free shredding impossible.

I don't generate enough to justify calling in a service.(and I'm cheap)
I have a small shredder that if I were to shred every day I could keep up with the load.(but some days I'm lazy)

So I had the idea that maybe a garden shredder/mulcher would accomplish the same thing.(and have a tool that would also help with leaf and small branch disposal)

Anyone with experience?

do you mean a chipper? if so i have a decent sized chipper and green foliage clogs it up. i would think paper would do the same. you can stir it up in a bucket of water but you're lazy like me. i send mine out when i get a one ton truck loaded to the max

Been there, I bought a "Mighty Mac" hammermill style with 8 hp Tecumseh.

Had to slowly feed by hand (watch the fingers, and don't slide too many in) very easy to stall with overloading.

Made a mess, (sheet flying all over the place, back out the top, leaky joints leaking fuzz....)did make it like cellulose insulation (my goal)
Clogged the air cooled fins very fast as well.

Sold it to neighbor for making horse bedding. Apparently inside the horse barn, flying sheet, is not a problem-o.....

How about burning it? When my mom died, she kept every piece of paper she ever touched neatly filed in a whole wall of file cabinets in the garage, I had quite the pile of papers to go through. Definitely wasn't feeding that through the shredder at 10 pages a time. The only issue was living in Southern California at the time waiting for it to get cold enough to crank up the fire place.

i tried burning once, dumped it in a 55 gal drum and all i got out of that was a stack of papers charred around the edges.

Yes my shredder is the burn barrel. I do have to stick a pipe in it and give it a stir a few times to get it all burned.

cg285 said:

i tried burning once, dumped it in a 55 gal drum and all i got out of that was a stack of papers charred around the edges.

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They burn much better if you shred them first....

cg285 said:

i tried burning once, dumped it in a 55 gal drum and all i got out of that was a stack of papers charred around the edges.

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You need some space to get some air. Did you throw them in all at once?

cg285 said:

i tried burning once, dumped it in a 55 gal drum and all i got out of that was a stack of papers charred around the edges.

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White office paper in particular doesn't burn well but if you get a good hot fire going first with wood scraps or brown cardboard and feed the papers in loosely they will burn.

Ah, the things we learned in the old days standing around a flaming barrel in the alley with a bottle of Muscatel.

oh it will burn if you feed it a little at a time or crumple it all up. that's a lot more work, with a ton of paper, than paying the professionals to shred it.

I get lots of crap that has to be shredded too. I have a couple of Rubbermaid totes that I keep next to the shredder and toss stuff in there. When they get full, I'll feed the shredder until the thermal overload kicks in and then let it sit for a couple of days til I have some more time. Since I work 3rds, I often am up and can't make much noise in the house without waking up the wife and kids, so I'll turn on some music and feed the shredder some more. Two totes gives me about 10 giant bags of shreds for the recycle center. I open the bags and dump them in the dumpster and then recycle the bags too.

A few years ago when I retired for the last time, I had nearly 100 boxes of business papers spanning some 30 years to get rid of. We arranged all of the boxes in a neat pile in my yard and called in a shredding company. It was a huge truck with a door on the left rear that contained an elevator to dump boxes into the shredder section.

It took one man less than 45 minutes to do all of the shredding. According to the operator, the machine was a military style cross-cut device that makes it impossible to reconstruct the shreds. It will do cardboard boxes, file folders, paper bundles, paper clips, metal paper straps, thick binders and note cards without even slowing down.

He put 5 or 6 boxes in at a time and then closed the door and punched the start button. About a minute later, he did another bunch.

I tried burning some of it before I called the company. I discovered that paper won't burn when in bundles. As mentioned above, it will char on the outside, but the remains are still legible. You can burn it, but only a page or two at a time, which would have taken me a long time to do and might have caused a brush fire in my rural area.

The bill? $85 and worth every penny. No fuss, no mess nothing to throw away and he left with the remains.

Wasn't sure when I posted whether the post would get dropped as being to OT but apparently not.
The free service the state uses has the above mentioned trucks that set up in the local universitys parking lot. They also accept paint, solvents and electronics
They normally have a few running at a time and make short work of everything they process.
Everything that comes in our house that is financially related ends up in the shred pile.
This often means cc applications, mailers with some plastic.We are also allowed to place cd's and dvd's within the shred mix.
Comments about the lawn shredder reinforced my thoughts whether it is practical.
I have a heavy duty office shredder that will do 4 pages at once.
I just hate sitting there feeding it.
Burning is not an answer where I live or where my shop is located.
I think some better time management on my part making the free dates is in order

I found that if you can get air under the paper, and a little through the stacks of paper it will burn pretty well. I break up some old pallets and scatter them for the bottom layer if I have nothing else to burn. Then put the paper vertically in some corrugated boxes, don't bundle or stack it flat or make it too tight, let it be loose in the boxes. Put the boxes on top of the wood. If you can put a piece or 2 of wood down between the paper in each box that's helpful too. Light the wood, and in an hour or two you'll be watching the remains of the fire dwindling down. I have an old single axle dump bed I use for a burn box, one afternoon I burned 30 years of about 20 magazines, made quite a show.

I bought this old commercial shredder at a flea market for $20, it will shred small magazines and catalogs in about 3 seconds. It's only single cut, but with several pages going through at once, there's no matching the shreds back together. sensitive documents go through one of the crosscut shredders at the desks, when I have a big file like end of year archives to do it goes through this in a minute. I was told it came from a dentist's office.

I repaired a smallish industrial shredder for a doctor's wife who did shredding for other medical practices. I learned she sells the shredded paper to farmers for bedding. That might be an avenue to get it shredded if you can find an end user who collects it and shreds it for their own use. There's a farm near here with a shredder in a barn stall that is just lousy with bits of shredded paper blowing everywhere, looks like a fire hazard to me.

mjk said:

I have a heavy duty office shredder that will do 4 pages at once.
I just hate sitting there feeding it.

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You need a goat... they tend to feed themselves.

Dennis

cg285 said:

oh it will burn if you feed it a little at a time or crumple it all up. that's a lot more work, with a ton of paper, than paying the professionals to shred it.

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I did 100 count stacks at a time easily in a fire place, air circulation and being in a dry climate I believe made the difference. Now in Central Virginia in the summer time it is so humid you probably could not light a legal pad with a blow torch.

Well...somebody had to post it...