I was told the glossy colored was worse then the dull colored but not sure. A little paper for starting fires and that's it, no glued wood products or any other paper no matter what the type.
Not to hijack but we got hit with a different scam - our subscription expired but they kept delivering. For months. Then they suddenly stopped and we got a bill for twice the regular subscription price, saying the we "owed them" for the delivered papers. I sent them a registered letter stating that I should not expect to receive, nor pay for, any additional product of any kind after the date that my subscription ends. That shut 'em up. I get magazines that do that too. They send a few more issues and then try to force you to pay - they don't ever get a renewal.
None of what I've read here can compare to what my neighbor told me her husband put in their furnace years ago. A plastic toilet seat! She said it damm near burned the house down, made the floor above the furnace hot. I don't know what his rationale was for doing that but alcohol probably had a say in it. Talk about an uncontrolled burn!
I don't really burn anything but wood in my OWB but I do have a steel drum out near my wood area I burn tons of paper/cardboard in weekly. My wife owns/operates her own shop in town...the amount of cardboard that fills my garage each week is ridiculous. Get some paper burning in my barrel and hang out feeding it while I sip my coffee! My wife makes fun of me cause she says I look like a hobo hanging out around a barrel fire, but it beats loading that all up to bring to the transfer station each week!
Just tell her, would you rather have this trash in your shop or me looking like a boss burning your “ish”
Im in the same boat. I live in a city subdivision and my first goal is producing as little smoke/smell as possible. The stove will always produce heat without putting "creative" things in it. Dont tell anyone though. Everytime somebody posts something on facebook or where ever about how the government spent hundreds of millions more tax dollars to produce one more watt of green electricity, I post that Ill make sure I throw a few more tires and a few dozen plastic bottles in the wood stove to honor their wonderful accomplishment. Lol.
The Progress gets wood/kindling only. I don't want paper ash choking the cat. The T6 in the basement gets the occasional newspaper to jump start the draft in the basement chimney. I stopped burning trash in the wood burners years ago. I recycle and shred a lot of stuff though.
I've burned bags of trash when I worked up North on a remote drilling rig, that's how we dealt with our garbage, there was no garbage pick up trucks or landfill sites nearby to send it to. We burned everything burnable, including plastics, styrofoam and food wastes, in an onsite gas incinerator. Leaving garbage lying around, especially food waste was a definite no no out there because it attracted bears. As for burning in my wood stove at home, I'm not adverse to burning a little bit of OSB and plywood scraps. I won't go out of my way to burn them, meaning I won't cut up bigger pieces to small pieces to fit in the stove, but if they are small enough (and dry enough) I'll burn them in the stove. They burn hot and clean in the stove which is more then I can say if I burn them in a pit outside, or if I take them to the landfill site (where they eventually burn them outside). For me, it's all about disposing of it as cleanly as possible and that is not going to happen if you burn it in an open fire outside. Does it do damage to my stove or flue? Well, I don't have a catalytic stove so I don't have to worry about that, and one can speculate till the cows come home, but after a lifetime of not holding back from burning OSB and plywood scraps, I have yet to see any evidence of damage resulting from burning occasional small OSB and plywood scraps in the stove. And like I said, burning it outside or sending it to the landfill is worse from an environmental perspective than burning it hot and clean in my stove so I don't feel any guilt about that. I know I'll probably be blackballed from the forum for publicly admitting this, but I don't see burning scrap OSB or plywood outside or sending it to the landfill as a better option. I don't burn treated lumber, that goes to the dump where they don't even burn it there, that goes into the actual landfill garbage and not in the woodpile where it would eventually get burned outside. Basically, I agree with this >>> http://web.utk.edu/~mtaylo29/pages/Don't Burn Treated Wood.htm
I use newspapers and paper egg carton to start the kindling. The egg cartons are nice, they stack together nicely and they are perfect for starting the fire. I haven't burned any paper products in bulk though.
We just burn firewood, I did try that top down method with newspapers but didn't like it so we don't burn any newspapers or magazines in the wood stove, just wood from the woodlands.
I’ve got a cat, and I’m not as anal about what I start my fires with simply because the bypass is open long after any non firewood is burned up. I’m no scientist, but a cat stove burning ‘not so good’ stuff should burn hot enough to break down the bad stuff. Gotta be better than what the dump is going to do with it. FWIW, I usually just use fatwood and a couple small pieces of kindling to get it started. About now, it should be burning non stop for about 3 months.
