guildfordcycads

Through the summer, a variety of projects left me with a lot of cardboard. Sounds like a good problem to have, but between the cardboard pile and the yield of using it, there’s the chore of getting all the plastic tape and strapping off of it. They’re essential to the integrity of larger cartons in transit, but not something I want in my soil.

The late end of the time frame when the plastic can come off the cardboard is when UV damage fractures the tape into a zillion little flecks of dandruff. Clearing it from the cardboard before then is important, but the UV degradation phase can be delayed by leaving the cardboard tape-side-down while it’s outdoors.

The early end of the time frame when the plastic and cardboard can be separated is as soon as it arrives. At that point in its life cycle, the adhesive from tape to cardboard is still extremely strong, as are the bonds between the various layers of fibers that comprise the cardboard. When the tape and cardboard are brand new, the tape sticks extremely well, which means it takes more effort to remove. Plus the tape can break under the forces of trying to pull its adhesive off the cardboard, which requires prying up the little broken end of tape and starting again, and it’s generally time consuming and obnoxious.

The “tape loves sticking to cardboard” thing is actually an incomplete assessment, though: Tape loves sticking to DRY cardboard. As soon as the layer of fibers under the adhesive gets damp enough to be floppy like cloth instead of stiff like paper, one of two things happens: Either the adhesive gives up entirely and the tape comes right off with barely any force, or the very outermost layer of the cardboard comes off with the tape and leaves all the rest of its biomass behind to be useful.

The easiest possible time to separate the plastic and cardboard seems to me to be after it’s been rained on a couple times, but before the plastic or cardboard has completely given up yet. There’s probably a second local maximum of easiness that could be reached by adding enough water to turn the cardboard to pulp and then screening out the plastic bits, but then the byproduct is pulp rather than cardboard sheets, and cardboard sheets are useful.

In the recent case I discarded the plastic strapping along with the tape, because I already have quite a bit of it saved up. The stiffer almost-solid plastic version of that stuff can be used like corset boning to add structure to any textile item if you sew, and the nicer woven kind can be used in place of nylon webbing in a lot of applications as long as you’re careful to melt the ends so it doesn’t fray out. The stiffer plastic kind of that webbing can be doubled up into a bulkier and only slightly weaker alternative to spring steel when making or mending anything that takes that thin flexible steel — think pop-up laundry hampers, fabric cat tunnels, etc. It’s not worth the combination of time and storage space for me to sort it out of the waste stream right this minute, but it can be useful for infrequent applications.

This particular cardboard packaging included some of that honeycomb-looking kind and also some of the very solid corner pieces that are almost like the material of a hardback book cover. The glue on the honeycomb stuff disintegrated completely with a bit of moisture exposure, so although I was feeling a little tempted to try using its little compartments for seed-starting, it would probably have fallen apart if I’d done that.

This time around, all the little bits and pieces of cardboard went onto my biodegradeables midden. That’s the out-of-the-way pile where I put stuff that will return to the earth on its own but wouldn’t make sense to burn or grow food in, mostly junk composite wood products like this cardboard, and also used cat litter.

For now, the sheets of cardboard that I harvested from the pile of junk boxes are suppressing weeds on the floor of a shed that I recently put up. They’ll rot slower there because it’s dry, and eventually when I want cardboard for garden projects, I can easily steal some from the shed. Or maybe I’ll leave them there too long and they’ll start turning into soil, which I would scrape out and use elsewhere if I wanted to put down a different ground treatment in the shed.

One of my favorite ways to use cardboard is as a weed barrier around newly planted trees. Shingling or perforating the cardboard so rain can get in to the roots for the first few seasons is important, as cardboard is enough to keep the soil beneath it quite dry during light summer rains. But the payoff to putting cardboard around little trees out in nature is that it makes it visually obvious which little trees I put there on purpose, versus which are volunteers.

There’s also a whole corner of YouTube where people make quite impressive furniture from cardboard and glue. But that stuff is for the kind of dry climates that you only get indoors around here for the wet half of the year (PNW 8B).