Using My Stihl Garden Shredder for Cardboard

We seem to accumulate masses of cardboard, I’m sure it breeds in the dark. Any shiny coloured card goes into the recycling. I find it doesn’t break down quickly and some coloured / printed cardboard uses a plastic film, which doesn’t compost. Some, perhaps most coloured card uses kaolin clay to coat which can compost.

Anyway, we have loads of plain, brown cardboard, which is quite useful in the garden. Laid in sheets under a mulch it helps suppress weeds, torn up it becomes a carbon source for compost.

Now, the smaller the pieces, the faster they’ll rot down. Something to do with surface area for bacteria to grab on to versus volume, smaller pieces have more surface area in relation to the volume. So shredding carbon-rich cardboard to mix with manure and other high nitrogen materials has to be a good idea.

A Cunning Plan!

Shredder and Chipped Branches in Bags – Nearly done!

We have a paper shredder, but it won’t cope with cardboard. You can buy heavy duty shredders, but I don’t think it’s worth paying out for yet another machine to just do one job.

Then I had a lightbulb moment! Why not use my Stihl GHE 105 garden shredder for the cardboard? If it will cope with branches, surely a bit of cardboard won’t slow it down.

Sadly, it’s not worth the effort.

For a start, the card has to be torn or sliced into pieces that will fit into the shredder’s mouth. Then each piece has to be coaxed down the maw into the tube. Since they have to design shredders so idiots with thin arms can’t stick their hands into the machine, this isn’t as easy as it could be. Also, the shredder doesn’t grab and pull the cardboard through as it does with branches.

Once fed in, the shredder copes just fine, producing fine pieces that will rot down quickly. But it’s less effort and time to just tear up the sheets into chunks to compost and accept they’ll take a little longer to break down than the fine flakes.