posted 14 years ago
If it's a big pile, and only one family's paper, it shouldn't be a problem. If you're bringing home stuff from a business because you need more browns, it might be tough to maintain ventilation, and there might be a couple more-subtle issues:
The only concerns I have in terms of toxicity are with commercial color printing, and with toner.
There's just a smidgeon of copper in a common pigment for cyan printer ink, but I guess it could build up to a real problem, especially if copper is already too abundant in your soil. In most cases, having a little extra compost in it will make soil much less toxic, even if that compost includes some metal contamination. If your soil is deficient in copper, or has too much zinc, then I say the color ink won't be bad in any reasonable amount.
Laser toner will have polystyrene in it as a binder, which can be bad in extreme heat. Laser toner pigments aren't a big deal, though. I'd be OK with it except in an arid to semi-arid climate.
Black printer's ink (on newspapers) has benign pigments and usually an edible (!) binder. Even the worst of old-fashioned printer's ink recipes would be OK after composting. Could be tiny traces of bad stuff from the recycled pulp, but not as bad as most people's soil.
Glossiness is usually a matter of bentonite clay. It will slow your compost pile down a little, and go farther in balancing greens than a usual source of browns would, because whatever minerals make it glossy are also a persistent sink for nitrates, in addition to the momentary sink that plain paper would be. It's well worth exploiting that resource, if you have sandy soil.
Office paper is a similar story, but with chalk in place of bentonite; a little lime is usually good, too much is always bad, and it depends on context. Mix the pile a little greener than usual, if you add a lot of office paper.
The berry containters don't sound familiar to me: are they made of similar stuff to paper egg cartons? That stuff composts well! If copper is a concern, you can burn a tiny scrap of it, and funky-colored flames will be a dead giveaway. Some containers have a thin HDPE coating, which won't be too difficult to sift out of the finished product, unless the whole thing was shredded on its way in.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.