The Hippies Are Coming for Your Cardboard

I don’t put cardboard in my compost, which is another Great Divide in the composting world. I don’t know what’s in that cardboard! It’s got printed designs and adhesives and dyes and laminates and other foul auras from who knows what. Can’t have that corrupting my cherry tomatoes.

As with most of my composting rules this comes from a combination of half-remembered guidelines read online somewhere and deep reptile brain superstition. But putting cardboard in compost as a good source of browns is a very popular practice. It’s even recommended by composting expert Cassandra Marketos in The Rot, which happens to be the real composting newsletter on this platform that actually completely posts about composting rather than halfway and inexpertly as does yours truly.

So I was very interested to read “A plea to stop using cardboard in compost” on Reddit’s composting sub. The poster self-identifies as someone who works “in packaging as an environmental engineer,” and recommends against composting cardboard for all the same reason I’d felt as vibes, namely chemicals and other unknown crap possibly getting into the plants grown with the resulting composted soil.

The post was, I thought, very qualified and reasonable, especially for Reddit, making note that mainly this was a concern based around lack of much science done regarding the effects of composting cardboard. But this being Reddit, it was as if Martin Luther nailed this post to the cardboard dumpster out back of Lowe’s. While there were detailed contrary replies from chemical engineers and other experts, there were also plenty of “well lots of other things could be bad” or “it’s the cheapest way to bulk out my browns” and “I have too many boxes not to keep composting them and recycling is inconvenient” or “well I bought this shredder so I’m going to use it” etc. Not to mention those contending the admitted lack of definitive anti-cardboard science made the original poster someone better off posting their nonsense on a “hippie blog.”

I admire the reply-restraint demonstrated (to a point) by the environmental engineer who started the post, as many of the responses were less than charitable. It’s a brave soul who enters the lair of dedicated enthusiasts and rolls in a grenade. Just don’t get anybody started about piss.

Running is boring, to me. I’ve never been good at it, and generally disliked running both outdoors and on treadmills just because I found it tedious. Which is weird because I like biking outdoors. But I started running on treadmill a couple years ago, and what made it compelling mentally was having a screen. Not to watch movies or TV, but to have a trainer running through some exotic locale and chatting about the place. It’s been just enough to distract and engage as I try to get my pulmonary system into some kinda shape and ward off senior citizen joint issues.

I was lucky to try Tommy Rivers Puzey (aka Tommy Rivs) for my first running videos on the treadmill. I was starting off from an injury, so began doing the long walks of Rivs’ “Road to Recovery” series rather than full-on running. Turns out this was a literal journey for Rivs, who had just barely survived a bout with cancer and was physically much diminished from his prime. Hence why he was doing walking videos rather than his more typical history of marathon training up mountain cliffs and such.

What I like about Rivs is he intensely studies the area covered by the walk or run, talking in a soothing monologue about its culture, history, geology, wildlife, society, and more, salting in an occasional deadpan or self-deprecating joke. He’s a friendly sort of crunchy healthy nature sasquatch type of dude. Very calming and encouraging rather than ra-ra-ra motivational bromides so typical of these trainers.

Once I got stronger I switched to Rivs’ older running videos, before the cancer diagnosis and accompanying physical depredations, and it was somewhat eerie to run with him in his state of blissful innocence. Stronger, faster, and much less tattooed, all unaware of what lurked in his future and my past. Fortunately Rivs seems to have made an excellent recovery, once again running in marathons in his spare time while still doing "Recovery” videos on the treadmill.

I hope he does new running videos soon though, as it turns out very few other video trainers bother to learn anything beyond the obvious about the places they’re running through. Or they half-learn just enough to be maddeningly uninformative. I nearly stopped a recent workout when a trainer running me through Croatia referred to a monument as being included on a list of landmarks published by “unesecco,” as I can only conclude she was pronouncing “UNESCO” like “prosecco.” I’d be much meaner than Tommy Rivs, who I imagine would gently correct with an indulgent beardy smile and a twinkling eye. I can only aspire to that level of Rivsness, mentally or physically, but I’m working on it.