Composting Cardboard

If you go to a recycling station there never seems anywhere to recycle cardboard. Paper yes, but not cardboard. The amount of household waste that is made out cardboard is vast and includes the following just for starters:

Cereal packets
Kitchen and toilet roll tubes
Toothpaste cartons
Fast-food packaging

So other than burn it or take it to the tip, what can you do with it? Well, one solution we can offer is 'gerbil power'! So how does it work?

Technique

Cardboard can be composted, but it only works well when broken into small pieces or 'flakes'. Breaking cardboard up by hand would be extremely hard work. Instead give the task to your pet gerbils; they're super-efficient cardboard processors. Give them some cardboard and they will be as happy as Larry.

Toilet roll tubes will be turned into cardboard shrapnel and become totally unrecognisable in under ten minutes. In fact without cardboard you will have bored and listless pets on your hands. Gerbils love to make nests out of the cardboard boxes, until they get destroyed, and will even use the resulting cardboard flakes to bury their food bowl; this appears to be something that's instinctive. And we can honestly say that our gerbils are happy and contented and do not feel in the least bit exploited.

So what do we do with the cardboard flakes? Well, we mix them up with our vegetable peelings and other waste matter, and then put it all into our compost bin. And it works a treat! We would caution that you shouldn't overdo the cardboard in the compost bin, as it can make everything dry and then the composting action will stop. I mention this particularly because the quantity of cardboard flakes that can be produced by two gerbils in a week say, is really quite staggering.