permaculture

[Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>]

This is an old story about lead in newspaper that springs from the past 
practice of using lead type in the old printing presses, hasn't been used 
in many years and when it was being used very little lead was left on the 
paper with the ink.  The ink itself does not contain any lead but today is 
contaminated with soy.  Next time someone asks you about it ask them to 
explain to you where the lead comes from.

Some of the colored inks did, and may still, have toxic properties ie 
Cadmium, so I have avoided the colored pages in my compost and mulch.

Scott P.



At 05:44 AM 6/13/03 -0400, you wrote:
> I've had a criticism of sheet mulching, to whit, newspaper is full of lead
> but you can get the lead out of the soil by growing cover crops and sending
> them to the landfill. Lone Rass! sez I, but does anyone out there in
> cyberland know of ANY plants that can take up lead for transport elsewhere,
> and how long does it take to say, deal with 800 ppm lead?
> Urban folk legends! Ay caramba!
> I say, dig it up and transport it to a sacrifice zone.
> >From everything I've seen lead in urban soils comes from #1, paint #2, other
> human fabricated sources transported & concentrated- old burn piles, etc. A
> paper I got from Inst. for Urban Hort. up in Seattle at the U of WA found
> that "soil lead content did not correlate with proximity to roads, but with
> length and intensity of human use of a site"
>
> -Rick