Is It Safe to Use Cardboard in the Garden? Concerns about "Forever Chemicals"
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2024
- Ok, I've been sitting on this topic for a while, but I saw it rear its ugly head again in a local gardening group this week.
A few months ago, a large garden page/blog made a claim that it's not safe to use cardboard in the garden because a new study said they contained PFAS "forever chemicals." It caused QUITE a lot of fear and anxiety in a number of garden groups on social media.
I made a lengthy reply to that post when it first appeared, and since it is making the rounds again - and needlessly scaring more gardeners - I want to take some time today to talk about Cardboard sheet mulching, PFAS, junk science/clickbait, and the realities of contamination when repurposing materials. And let's throw in a little bit of industrial polluters and policy change while we're at it, too. :)
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I live in West Wales and have recently heard it suggested by a local, organic farmer that he couldn’t use cardboard on his farm. As we have just started our new sheet mulched vegetable garden and are passionate about good organic practice, we were dismayed to say the least! We contacted The Soil Association (the UK regulatory body for organic growers) for guidance. They said that the issue for commercial growers was traceability back to source (impossible for cardboard, apparently), but that for domestic growers the issue was with adhesive tapes, shiny finishes and heavily printed boxes. Lightly printed boxes, unbleached, and with all adhesive tape and labels removed should be fine to use.
Thanks for an informative video. I'm at the age where without cardboard i would never had achieved the garden i have now. It has been a huge plus for me and i will continue using it in the future.
May I ask what you personally use the cardboard for in your garden?? I use it to help prevent weeds and in compost!
Great post! In the big scheme using cardboard isn’t nearly as bad as some other things. I am always amazed at when people get bent out of shape about something like this but are then consuming all kinds of food ‘products’ and lathering their skin with chemicals.
A valid point!
I'm right on board with you on the type of cardboard we use in the garden! My toilet paper rolls and no-coating cardboard is NOT going to hurt my "soil". I'm out here in the shifting sands of the coast and I use the cardboard to hold moisture. Sand makes great drainage, however, I like it when the water stays long enough for the plants to have a drink. 🙂I love seeing what you have to say when you post. Keep it up!
Really great stuff as always!
The only thing I would add is just to be discerning about where cardboard is being sourced from to try to minimize introducing extra avoidable contaminants. For example, I used to work at a hardware store and a lady would come in and take some of our shipping boxes for her yard. I think I was the only one there that would sort the "clean" cardboard for her when breaking them down though unfortunately. A problem is that in shipments, products can easily be damaged leading to leaks of industrial cleaners or various other really harmful chemicals soaking into the cardboard, some of which dries completely clear and doesn't leave a discoloration mark.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying panic or freak out or anything lol. There are a lot of places where clean cardboard can be sourced, just saying maybe use a little caution if trying to source from places that frequently handle potentially dangerous chemicals. Oh, and don't forget to remove the tape! 😜
Thanks again for everything you do and all your hard work!
Thank you Angela. I find these kinds of fear mongering extremely frustrating.
If as many people that were scared by that post were instead properly educated and encouraged to reach out to local authorities, companies, etc about making a change, I feel like that would be more productive and healthy for their audience. I'm tired of being told that I am responsible for watching out for all the things that are wrong or dangerous in this world, I'd like to just have my garden and live my life. 👌🌻💜
I’ve converted my third front yard with lasagne cardboard and wood chips, I swear by it. My current one is all Costco flats, no coating. I’ve used about 130 so far and planted fruit trees and bushes, and native plants.
I'm so glad you covered this! I saw the post and, being a scientist myself, immediately went and read the original article. I had the exact same concerns as you about the conclusions they drew from this study. I do follow the group you mentioned because they have good information on their blog about some other topics...but they definitely get dogmatic (dare I say rabid??) about sheet mulching with cardboard in the garden. They always cite research on the topic, but they interpret that research in the most rigid way possible without considering nuance.
Are you something of a scientist yourself?
I noted this fear mongering stuff circulating on the socials recently and I was alarmed by the ignorance. It bothered me, but I also didn't look into it further. So thank you for taking the time to do a thoughtful response with great information.
Thank you Angela for bringing science literate point of view to permaculture. The fact that you seem to be the only one doing that is scary. We need science education, we need education. Our problems will never be resolved otherwise.
Thank you. As an older person moving to property, I really appreciate this information. We will have a lot of boxes. I need to get my garden area established sooner rather than later. Although I have gardening experience, I am new to permaculture. I want to create a garden from which the next generation will get enjoyment and subsistence. We are also in Western OR so your experience and knowledge is especially useful.
I live in St Paul, not far from one of the 3M sites that is well known to have contaminated the soil. The state won a large payout for remediation, but it comes to a point where nobody even knows how that is possible. Even if you could remove the soil, where would you put it?Our drinking water comes from the Mississippi river, upstream, but I still see fearmongering around "drinking St Paul water" although tap water is unlikely to be a source of contamination here. Sometimes people latch onto a 'scary' thing and use it as a cudgel. IF they can control contact with the one specific thing in one specific way, then they'll be safe.
Thank you for clarifying this. I saw one of the fear mongering posts and thought that's crazy; but I didn't understand why. I figured I wouldn't stop using cardboard, but now I will assess which cardboards I am using.
Thank you for this! I never saw this post so I'm grateful that your video was my first exposure to this issue! (Especially since I just used cardboard in this year's tiny veggie patch which I happened to build out of my car's old tires as a way of recycling them to make raised beds! 😅 I do plan on making the veggie patch bigger and tire-free next year but this year tires were what I could manage.❤️ (The tires will instead get relegated to containing our compost heap.)
Thanks so much for sharing this. I definitely clicked on a TH-cam video saying this a few years ago but sheet mulched anyway. I have chronic pain and it has saved me from so much pain! And my soil looks so much better
In addition to corporate capitalistic systemic issues, I would also add issues in academia. So much academic research in horticulture or agriculture is devoted to large scale operations, and very little to small scale or residential gardens. Even information through the extension office references things like "x number of fruit trees per hectare". I don't want to grow a full scale orchard, I'm just interested in planting a couple of fruit trees in my yard. It's difficult to translate the information to the average residential garden plot.
Excellent point!
I deeply appreciate your thoughtful and careful analysis, across all topics! Thank you!!
it reminds me of a conversation I had with someone online a while ago. He had seen an article talking about how PFAS was now found at unsafe levels in rainwater around the world and was freaking out about it. I talked to him about how there are very different levels of "unsafe" and lots of different ways to respond besides existential terror and apathy.
even if there's some amount of pfas you'd need another study to show that certain crops can absorb them and transfer them to people eating them in a significant way
Thank you Angela for this informing video. Your welcome. From a Buddhist Monk.
Interesting...personally I use clean cardboard to lasagna garden and sheet mulch because I have heavy clay and a shoulder injury so digging just won't happen...and no budget to rent heavy machinery like a sod ripper.. Just this morning another big garden account posted an anti cardboard reel. Strange how controversial this seems to be.
It’s the new trendy “you thought this was good?? Well you’re wrong!” Clickbait. Like “honeybees are always terrible awful bad” or “cultivars are super awful plant only straight species” or whatever it’s trendy to be contrarian about in a way that grossly exaggerates and misrepresents what data there is.
Thanks! I haven't been on TH-cam for a while but so happy to see your face and learn from your fantastic content again!
Thank you!!!
Thank you!
I always feel empowered by your videos! Thank you!❤
Thank you for this post with the sources. Highly appreciate.
it's so weird how people seem to never expect people to read the studies that they use to source a claim
Just got referred to this, and thanks for the thing you're doing here!
Part of the problem is the people writing the clickbait.
Part is more insidious, and to my mind, a larger problem stemming from it, namely the people who will assert a GREAT deal of authority in going "ride or die" for this clickbait. They're quite impervious to anything resembling looking at the things they say the science is saying, let alone figuring out anything about what the science they're citing actually supports, and they go very quickly to personal attacks in this process. These people, and if you don't think you know one, you're averting your attention from them, go a long way toward making permaculturists look like kooks. I hope there is some systemic and maybe even public pushback against this kind of thing.
Wow, a bit confused now, having just visited a site that shared the PFAs scare. I've used lasagna gardening for years and actually have had better results in earlier years. But, bottom line, since I don't use any pesticides or herbicides, I think my garden produce is safer anyway.
You could refer to Prof. Linda Chalker Scott YT videos from Washington State University and her research on using cardboard and alternatives she suggests. Her argument is not about forever chemicals but more about impeding oxygen transfer into/out of the soil and that cardboard is unnecessary. Having said that, I have used cardboard under 6-8" of wood chip for eliminating large areas of lawn grass and persistent quack grass with good effect.
She's the other researcher I take issue with on this topic. There' s a lot I could say about the way I have seen her engage around this issue in online spaces and suffice it to say, it has seemed ideological as much as data-driven.
There are many places where it's not possible to put 12 inches of woodchips, but you need to suppress grass and cardboard plus 1-2 in of chips works extremely well. For example, the narrow strip I showed in this video between my driveway and my neighbor's - I can't use 6, 8,12 inches of chips, but if I don't control the grass/weeds on my neighbor's half of the strip, he'll do it with RoundUp...an application every single week without fail. Which is worse, cardboard with 1-2 in of chips, or a neighbor who liberally applies RoundUp 52 times a year along your property line?
@@ParkrosePermaculture Agreed. It is sometimes not feasible.
Thanks!
Angela
I lost count of the number of advert interruptions to your video, double adverts to boot. Strange that most of the ads were around the time you were speaking on industrial uses of forever chemicals. 🤔
I use shredded cardboard for my worm bins. If I had to worry about cardboard containing PFAS, I would have to stop eating… lol.
I saw this video title and was shocked and ready to do my own research if you said this was a problem. I use cardboard and paper feed sacks all over my garden for weed blocking. I've actually been doing some digging in on pfas in my garden and the fertilizer I get is my biggest concern.
Great points thank you for clarifying this stuff
do you or anyone else have access to the full paper? The link goes to limited information. I want to see the methods they used in this study. I want to see, what variables were controlled in the study. There are toxins in commercial chicken feed, there are other sources of exposure for PFA exposure. Did they control for those exposures??
For several years (5?) I've used cardboard in the garden and gotten the landscape morel (morchella importuna) to flush within inches of where the cardboard was laid. Many other gardeners/mushroomers in the PNW report the same. So freakin' yummy. They don't make a huge portion of my diet - just a treat a few times a year - but what a bummer it would be if I couldn't use cardboard!
Where is the chemical analysis on 100 regular cardboard boxes vs 100 PFAS packaging?
Are you talking about Linda Chalkler Scott? Yeah do a video on her!
Yuppppppp.
I hadnt seen this but its very reassuring. Im ripping up any brown cardboard, egg cartons and paperbags i can get my hands on to compost or add to worm farm.
Oh, good to know; thank you!
Thank you for this❤
One thing Linda says in an la times article I’m wondering if anyone agrees: that you can kill lawn by cutting grass as short as possible then covering w just wood chips. Has anyone had success w this method? Thanks.
She says a foot of woodchips. I think that would work for many weeds but maybe not Quackgrass or other tough rhizominous grasses.
Most folks can’t add a foot of chips in pathways or many places in their yard. It doesn’t feel practical.
Yes, used a weed whacker to basically dirt. Covered with A LOT of chips, though I rarely measure to see if it is 1 foot deep per the recommendation. Grass is back.
Prior ignorant hippie here.....40 years ago we had to start somewhere. Dont know what ya dont know. 😅 good post, carry on lil' sista!
Thank you for this post!
Will cardboard attract termites?
I read a university study from India that ground garlic soaked a good while in water is effective as termites don’t like the smell. But I wonder for how long. Seems the odor would dissipate long before the cardboard breaks down.
Also, are moving boxes with writing (i.e. XYZ movers or my own felt tip pen writing on it) be of concern?
Great video! Quick question: does using cardboard in the garden attract termites and if so, how would I go about deterring them outside of not using cardboard. Thanks in advance!
I haven’t heard before of concerns of PFAS in soil, just water. Seems like much to do about nothing. I guess maybe if certain paints are on the cardboard it could cause contamination but we run the danger of that anyway if you buy compost from say a recycling facility.
The thing is they didn’t prove that PFAS get into the soil through cardboard! And they definitely didn’t prove that your plants take them up and they are a risk to you if you use them in the garden. No, I don’t want to put them into the environment, but the study they say it does not prove the very bold things they are claiming.
What we know from that study is that mixed shredded paperboard and cardboard products of unknown origin may contain PFAS and if it is used as poultry bedding, chickens may test positive for it in their tissues and eggs. Now we don’t know if the bedding was the source, or if there are multiple sources, like the water they are drinking, or some other material in their enclosure, because chickens peck and consume everything. It certainly doesn’t mean that plain corrugated cardboard will contaminate your soil and you should stop using it!
But if the cardboard is recycled it can contain all kinds of crap, or no? Its a serious question.
I am not an expert on recycling, but my understanding is that coated cardboards can't get recycled into plain corrugated cardboard. If you find out more info on that process, please share! I would love to know more.
I have a lot of social media frustration, and people like these bloggers really exacerbate my frustration.
As a person who works with the public all day, I can assure you it's not much better 😂
I use cardboard all the time. This Clickbait stuff has to go. Haters gonna hate. I’m all love. I don’t have time for the haters. Thanks for posting.
😂Claims to be gardening experts😂 Some people take the "Master gardening" course and promote that as if they knew it all!
Thanks!