Our stuff has arrived! From a 40′ overseas container, all of the furniture and other clutter that piled up in our lives in Germany stared back at us in the form of hulking cardboard monsters.

Every single piece of everything was mummified in paper-products. I couldn’t recognize anything. Even my humble watering can was enveloped, braced for the rigors of the high seas! It took us days to unpack all of it (I’m talking about just the paper mummies – going through all the boxes is another story), turning our front yard into a 5′ scale model of the Andes in cardboard and packing paper. What were we supposed to do with this stuff?! Multiple long trips to the recycle center (no curbside here yet) isn’t the best way to reduce our carbon footprint, so we looked for other ideas. And here we go – we found some articles on composting cardboard here and here. It’s a great solution for us, because the soil here is fairly poor (although it’s nice and sandy for German-style asparagus) and I have big garden plans! It meant, of course, that my husband spent a whole day climbing the Andes to remove all the plastic packing tape, filling four 45 gallon garbage bags with the stuff. Our British neighbor (yippee! a fellow foreigner!) came over to help and was wonderfully entertaining with jokes about the indestructibility of German tape.

In the end, we got all the paper materials compost ready, giving some to my mother in law and even to another neighbor who saw what was going on and asked for some.

It’s a shame that the “indestructible” German packing tape was made of plastic instead of something that could compost down along with the cardboard. The 4 bags of it are waiting on the porch for a trip to the dump. I wonder when my husband will get around to that?

Tags: sustainability

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Environment, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.