Mix it with wood chips or shredded leaves. Sounds like there is an excess of moisture. I'd just go ahead and let that liquid go into the soil in your garden. Spread it around if you can. Otherwise, you just need to mix those high-nitrogen sources with a suitable high-carbon source. Usually, the high-carbon sources provide enough air space to allow normal, aerobic decomposition. Shredded paper would work, chipped wood, shredded leaves.

If it's 'anaerobic' because it's soaking in water, dump it into a leaky bin, poke holes in the bottoms of your cans, spread it around, or pile it up in one ordinary unmanaged heap and the problem will rather quickly fix itself. It's not a big one.

A flow of a stinky liquid from a composting operation always says there is way too much water and the whole process is anaerobic (in the absence of air). That can cause plant disease pathogens to grow. The safest place to use this liquid is on non food plants.
The garbage can composters need to be emptied out and remixed with dryer material added in an attempt to dry the material out, some.

That's some dedication Francoise.

When I get stuff like this, I just dump it on top of the compost or worm bins; the smell goes away quickly as the material is exposed to the air. Worms, by the way, love the material that has been anaerobically processed.
Renais

Hi all, thanks so much for you help and great tips!
We are a family of 6 and we have a ton of veggie scraps and not much leaves and such. This year I have been saving all the cardboard from work and purchased products. Ive been shredding it up as best as I can and putting it as an above ground insulator for my trees and potted plants arount the yard.
Any tips for shredding up a minivan full of ikea cardboard?

I would like to pour it all out and deal with it in a big pile but I do worry about attracting more rats mice skunks and raccoons.

I have a big bale of a peat mix. Do you think dumping it all out onto a tarp, mixing it all up with dry wood chips, leaves and peat mix then scooping it back into some rotating compost bins could help dissipate some of the moisture to make it manageable and create some heat?

Thanks again all!

This post was edited by Metrogardener on Thu, Dec 11, 14 at 20:57

All you need is some carbon to absorb the...richness...of your nitrogen materials.

The easiest way to tear cardboard is to get it sopping wet;
put it in a tub of water & turn the kids loose on it.

PIck up bagged autumn leaves on the week-ends when people are able to work in the yard, & on the nights before the trash is picked up, & put them into your compost buckets.

Remember to put coffee filters, used paper towels/napkins/etc into the compost bucket.

Find a woodworker or cabinet maker or some such & see if you can get the sawdust from the shop;
they usually have a mountain of it, & they like to get rid of it because it's both dusty & flammable.

If you get the newspaper, rip it up or shred it & put it in your bucket.

In a pinch, you can get a huge bale of shavings at the feed store (there's a Tractor Supply near me) for about $5, or you can get 40 pounds of stall pellets (compressed pine) for about $6.

I don't deliberately use peat (if someone gives me some, say at a plant swap, I mix it into the compost to break it down), because you simply cannot get it wet, & if you do soak it for several days & get it wet & mix it into your soil & it gets dry again, it'll suck moisture out of the surrounding soil & dry out your plant roots, & because it seems to me that a material that's used to preserve fruit in shipping can't also facilitate the composting process.

but that's just me.

although you might google "bog bodies".

It needs to drain to the ground. If I was using a garbage can I would turn it upside down and or cut out the bottom, and not little holes, big ones or just no bottom. It will work fine as soon as the excess water is drained off and you will have great compost. Just adding more stuff will not help and only make a bigger mess. Just once its draining do add more browns, like dry leaves or shredded wood.

Wait until the wind is blowing away from the house, and dump it out on the ground. The smell will go away pretty quickly. If you have a neighbor downwind, phone them up and ask if they've noticed some horrible smell, and how you have no idea where it could be coming from. :-)

or dump it onto dry ground & water it in & maybe cover it with sawdust or mulch or soil.

My grandmother canned like a driven woman (well, it was habit: she had raised 12 children during the Depression), & she had so much stuff in the pantry that there was always something back there that had turned into what looked like black water.

Her son, my Uncle Sterling, was the one who always disposed of that stuff.

He'd take the jar to the far side of the garden, kick a divot out of the earth with the heel of his boot, pour the jar's contents into the divot, & kick the soil back over it.

Peat moss, what is on hand, will absorb a lot of that excess moisture, although it will not contribute anything in the way of nutrients to that mix.

Thank you for the additional suggestions!
I think I may crack open that bag of peat mix, it should help with aeration and compaction I hope.
I was looking at the wood pellets for firepplaces but methinks they may have chemicals used to hold them together.

Free is better than store bought anyway. :-] Another product is wood shavings in a square bale, for horse/livestock bedding. Find it at a farm supply if you have one. But free shredded paper, newspaper, sawdust, wood chips from the utility tree trimming people, free yard waste/mulch site leaves or wood chips...all can be free.

I don't know about the pellets, will have to look that up, but I suspect they are held together simply by incredible pressure. The logs you buy one at a time in a paper sack do have stuff in them I think, but the fuel pellets have to be made as cheaply as possible and I think they just extrude sawdust. Now you have me curious.

It appears they are just sawdust and sometimes other plant materials, but no chemicals.

"Pellets are produced by compressing the wood material which has first passed through a hammer mill to provide a uniform dough-like mass.[9] This mass is fed to a press where it is squeezed through a die having holes of the size required (normally 6 mm diameter, sometimes 8 mm or larger). The high pressure of the press causes the temperature of the wood to increase greatly, and the lignin plasticizes slightly forming a natural "glue" that holds the pellet together as it cools.[4]"

Standards are voluntary in the US so there is no 100% guarantee, but if this is the standard technology, it's unlikely anyone would spend extra $ on chemical ingredients.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pellet Fuel - Wikipedia

You can get a huge bale of shavings for horse stalls for about $5 at a feed store, or, if you like pellets, get a 40 pound bag of stall pellets for $6.

The pellets are just compressed pine, & they dissolve into powdery sawdust when they come into contact with moisture.

Both these products make good kitty litter.

OK, this is an odd suggestion, but something I've used before.
Having worked in Spec Ed for 38 years, at times there are classes that have students too low functioning to go into a workplace and are put into a sheltered workshop. Some of the jobs brought into said workshops are often shredding paper!
The paper is recycled, but in my case, they were happy to have it go to a good cause!
You might get in touch with your county school's Spec Ed dept. and see if they have a program like this.
Just another option! Nancy

I wonder what the paper-shredding "document security" companies do with that stuff...

Some is burned to produce electricity but most is landfilled, usually in plastic bags.

Why would you leave off recycling as an endpoint? Or are you saying shredding companies are destroying it as a security measure? I suppose that's possible but shredding ought to take care of that. Just wanted to clarify that the recycled paper market is huge. A couple minutes of searching indicates, for example, "Recovered paper accounts for 37% of the US pulp supply." [link below]

I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be used for compost, although reuse is a 'higher and better use' (to use the recycling jargon) and is preferred if other carbon sources are available for composting. Especially nice white office paper, which commands a premium on the recycling market.

Here is a link that might be useful: Recycled Paper Market - Packworld.com

This post was edited by toxcrusadr on Fri, Dec 19, 14 at 11:25

In our area the document shredders accept documents with plastic covers or elements. The resulting product cannot be recycled in a high quality stream. It can be used as a garden mulch so that it does not get sent to the landfill, but the results can be interesting. I mulched an area with a fair number of bags of the shredded documents, and found the next year that I was seeing all kinds of little plastic shimmers on the ground. All the paper had degraded, but the plastic, some of which was obviously fairly uv tolerant, remained. In a couple years, the plastic was either gone or buried, but it did make for quite a sight.
Renais

A premise behind what to do with shredded paper was that it could be recycled and used to make new paper. You always need some old paper to make new paper. However, a problem developed early on in that the commercial shredders did not produce a "clean" product, ie. there was plastic and metal and other undesirable material included. That shredded paper might find a market in cellulose insulation, although that market is quite small.

One major problem with handling materials for recycling is that the cost of shipping them from where they are to where they need to be is quite high, much more then the material will fetch in the market.