To start:
- Take some old newspapers, tear them into quarters and half fill an old but clean plastic bucket with them.
- Cover them with water and give them a day or two to soak up the water. Do not leave them too long or they will start rotting and begin to smell like the bottom of a pond.
- Pound the paper with a substantial stick - I prefer to use an old piece of aluminium tubing - but a stick is just as good, until the paper has become a thick pulp. Keep adding water as the pulp begins to absorb what you put in originally. There should be no bits of newspaper large enough to be read what was printed on them, it should all be a grey sludge, This usually takes about 30 minutes all told.
- Wonderfully, this grey sludge dries to an attractive light buff colour.
Another way
- You can take your shredded paper and put it in hot water in a microwaveable container and microwave it for 10 minutes. Repeat every hour for five hours.
- This way seems to be very long and laborious and in the 5 hours that you have spent using this process you could have made much more pulp by the stick and bucket method.
