A little while back I received an email from RWC follower, Troy K. He wanted to share his nifty method for shredding up egg carton cardboard.

Just wanted too pass along a very easy – and extremely quick – way to shred cardboard egg cartons. I always dread shredding but know it has to be done, so I came up with the idea of using my leaf vacuum mulcher. It’s a Worx GT mulcher and I can shred 6 dozen cartons in 30 minutes. I ran them through once, but thought they needed to be just a hair smaller, so I ran them through again and they came out perfect! Like many people I’m a single full-time parent so every minute of my time is important. I just thought you might like hearing this and thought you might pass it along.

Troy sent me a follow-up email with some additional details…

In my opinion any leaf mulcher will work, you just need to make sure the one your using has a steel rotor blade. There are a lot of leaf mulchers that use plastic – but they will tear up real quick. Also, the long hose and bag in the picture was bought separately – that one in the pic fits on top of most garbage cans up to 50 gallon. That vacuum mulcher comes with a bag attachment that has a shoulder strap on it. You can find the Worx GT at Home Depot or Lowes or go to www.worxgt.com an order it directly from the company.

I thought this was a really ingenious idea (thanks Troy for letting me share!). I don’t know if could handle corrugated cardboard (I can always dream, right?), but needless to say, a machine like this would be very valuable for fragmenting (i.e. “optimizing”) a variety of materials that could then be added to a vermicomposting system.
😎