Look carefully at the cardboard and see if it mentions where it's printed, then contact them. Otherwise, email the beer company and ask if the printers use soy-based inks. Title your email something like "Question from satisfied customer". It is likely to be either soy-based or the bad stuff. If it's soy-based, they will probably be quick to tell you so. If they don't respond, it tends to be a 'negative' answer.

If the blue water fertilizer is made from manmade chemicals, it probably won't do your microbes much good. Google the specific brand and name of the fertilizer and add MSDS (material safety data sheet), which should list most of the ingredients. Then look up the ingredients and see what they are. Things like urea, ammonia, ammonium nitrate, potassium chloride, superphosphates, etc are manmade. See example link below

Real organic fertilizers are things from organic sources or naturally mined minerals. Look for OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) on the label.

An incomplete list:

Nitrogen: Alfalfa meal, bloodmeal, cottonseed meal (organic preferred), fish meal, soybean meal, canola meal (rapeseed), corn gluten meal, bat/bird guano.

Phosphorus: Bone meal, fish bone meal, rock phosphate (hard or soft).

Potassium: wood ash, greensand, K-Mag (Langbeinite-also contains magnesium), kelp meal (also contains many useful trace minerals).

Composted cow and poultry manure has a fair amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and would probably be your best best locally. Keep it covered to avoid leaching for best results. Get it 'raw' and do your own composting, or already composted.

Sue

Here is a link that might be useful: Scotts Miracle-Gro MSDS

colours are now derived from natural materials ie.,. plant, rock etc.,. if you can recycle the material into your garden area somewhere do so. we use it all mail box dodgers with all their colour makes no difference we use it and the worms seem to like the coloured stuff better.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

Very few printers are using metal-based inks now because of the cost of cleaning the presses. Almost no one is willing to pay the hefty surcharge that thee printer tacks on to the printing bill to cover the cost of the cleaning.

Even the varnishes for the gloss are soy-based. Shred them and use them, or flatten them and use them as a weed barrier under mulch.

The prejudice against colored inks is a hold over from the days when they had metal in them. Some of those metals were quite toxic (even mercury in some cases). That hasn't been true for many years but old garden tales sometimes get accepted as facts even after they aren't any more.

The only inks you have to avoid nowadays are the fluorescent or metallic ones. The glossy coat on cardboard and paper is usually kaolin, which is a clay anyway. So composting those is just putting the kaolin back into the earth it came from. Just shred the stuff so water can seep in through the cut edges and break it down faster.