Cereal Boxes

As a kid growing up, Dr. Lenny was a voracious reader. Sitting around at breakfast reading a cereal box was a great way to emulate dad reading the newspaper. Those FDA requirements that were met for iron and niacin were, well, super important facts: similar to the back of baseball cards. Eventually, as general mills and other companies realized that kids like me had this habit of reading the boxes, we began to get puzzles and free offers that committed our parent to buying stuff from those friendly folks providing flakes.

Now, the size of the box and the volume of cereal are quite disconnected. Lots of processed sugar and added 'nutrional value supplementers', which used to be called filler. Very little grain for a hugely inflated cost. The boxes are made of very short cardboard fibers, the kind that wont hold together any longer for pulp and paper due to overcycling. And now there is a use for this waste material that they ask you not to recycle - use it as a compost timer.

By taking pressboard and ripping it into pieces and scattering in my compost pile, it adds to the green material decomposing and also give me an indicator for when the process is done - i can't decipher the material. The strands are very short - the heat of the active anerobes in the center of the pile is enough to catalyze the reaction - plus it is a marvelous bug food source. Fungi like to infest it (though not near as much as fungi like corrugated cardboard), and the compost pile is just one set of bacteria finding food source on the heels of another set of stuff, continuing as long as the food source remains plentiful and the limited oxygen circulating can be used for metabolism. When the heat goes down, stir it up. when the boxes are gone - compost is ready to use. Supplements the propaganda value and returns material into the biological flux more rapidly.