Can you recycle shredded paper?

It depends

Usually not loose in the bin. Shredding makes paper too small for sorting machinery to catch. Some programs accept it inside a closed paper bag. Check yours, and compost it if they don't.

Follow it down the line

Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.

The material · Sometimes

Is the material recyclable?

Paper is recyclable; shredding paper makes it worth less, and how much less depends on how finely it was cut. Measured against fiber length and paper strength, shredding to pieces larger than about 25 mm2 barely changes the pulp. Below that, fiber morphology changes significantly and tensile strength falls sharply. A cross-cut security shredder is well under that threshold. Office paper is also a high grade before it is shredded and a mixed grade afterwards, so the loss is in value as much as in fiber. The research is more forgiving than the reputation, which is worth knowing before you feel guilty about a bin bag of confetti. Lipkiewicz and colleagues found that paper can be cut to 5 mm or larger without significantly shortening the fibers or changing the pulp and paper properties, and that particle areas above 25 mm2 did not significantly affect tensile properties at all. Only below that line does the fibrous fraction take considerable damage and disintegrate into finer material. So the problem is not shredding as such. It is security shredding, which is designed to destroy precisely the structure a paper mill is trying to keep. Fiber has a finite number of lives in any case. The paper industry counts recycled fibers as good for five to seven passes before they are too short to make new products, and shortening is the mechanism that ends a fiber's life. A security shredder does that deliberately, in one step, to paper that was near the top of the grade ladder when it went in.

Sources: Lipkiewicz et al., Scientific Reports 2021 (peer-reviewed), AF&PA: Design Guidance for Recyclability

The facility · No

Will a sorting facility recover it?

Shredded paper fails on handling rather than chemistry. It has to be bagged, because loose shreds scatter, and bags break open under compaction in the truck. Rhode Island's statewide program removed shredded paper from mixed recycling for exactly this reason: even properly prepared bags can break open in an overly compacted truck, and when they do, the loose shreds cover the other recyclables and lower their value. That is the failure worth understanding. It is not that the fiber is unusable, it is that carrying it costs the facility the value of everything else in the load, at a plant sorting 450 tons a day. There is a second and simpler mechanism underneath the first. A sorting line separates by size and shape before it separates by anything else, and the screens have a floor: items smaller than about three inches in two dimensions fall through the gaps and leave with the residue bound for landfill. A shred is far below that in every dimension. So even when the bag survives the truck, loose shreds are not really sorted badly, they are simply lost, and they take some of the load's value down with them on the way out.

Sources: Rhode Island Resource Recovery: shredded paper removed from mixed recycling, Atlantic Packaging: Deep Dive, Sorting Recyclables at a Modern MRF

Your curbside program · Varies

Will your curbside program take it?

Programs split roughly three ways: some refuse shreds outright, some accept them sealed inside a closed bag so they travel as a single object, and some run periodic shredding events instead. The containment rule is where programs stop agreeing, and the disagreement is more instructive than it looks. SWALCO wants a kraft paper bag, a paper grocery bag will do, sealed by folding, rolling, stapling or taping, and says explicitly not to use a plastic one. Cuyahoga County keeps shreds out of the curbside cart altogether and directs them to a mixed paper drop-off, where it will accept either a paper bag or a clear plastic bag, describing that as the one exception to its usual rule against plastic bags. Those two are not contradicting each other, they are describing different routes. A curbside cart feeds a highly automated line on which a plastic bag is a tangler; a mixed paper drop-off is handled differently, so the bag that causes a problem in one place is tolerable in the other. SWALCO's underlying reason is the one to carry away: current MRFs are highly automated systems that, in their present configurations, do not effectively recover loose shredded paper. The bag is not about tidiness. It is the only way shreds arrive as something the plant can see at all.

Sources: SWALCO: can I recycle my shredded paper?, CuyahogaRecycles: Shredded Paper

What you need to do

Never put shreds loose in the bin; they scatter through the facility
If your program accepts them, use a closed paper bag unless it says otherwise, and never a plastic one at the curb
Keep them dry; damp shreds clump and are rejected
Remove anything non-paper before shredding: staples, plastic windows, laminated cards
Cut coarser where you can. Above about 25 mm2 a piece of paper is still ordinary paper to a mill

Where else it can go

Compost it

Shredded paper is close to ideal compost material: carbon-rich and already broken down into small pieces, so it needs no preparation at all. The short fiber length that makes it nearly worthless to a paper mill is completely irrelevant to a compost heap, which is why this is an upgrade rather than a fallback. Cuyahoga County suggests it directly for clean shreds.

Uncoated paper only. Skip glossy sheets and anything with a plastic window.

Garden mulch or pet bedding

Works as weed-suppressing mulch under other material, or as bedding for small animals, both of which use the paper for its bulk and absorbency rather than its fiber.

Plain paper with soy or vegetable-based ink is preferable for either use.

Mixed paper drop-off

Where curbside refuses shreds, a staffed or dedicated mixed paper drop-off often takes them, because it is not the same machinery. This is Cuyahoga County's standing answer, and it is the route that keeps the fiber in the paper stream rather than the garden.

Bag them. Check whether your drop-off wants paper or will take a clear plastic bag, because programs differ on exactly this.

Shred less

Most documents only need the part carrying your name, account number or signature destroyed. Tear that strip off, shred it, and recycle the rest of the sheet intact at full value, which keeps high-grade office paper in the grade it started in.

Common mistakes

Tipping loose shreds into the bin, which is the fastest way to contaminate a whole load
Bagging shreds in plastic: the bag is a tangler and the load may be pulled unopened
Shredding whole documents when only a few lines actually needed destroying
Assuming a drop-off follows the same bag rule as the curb. Cuyahoga accepts a clear plastic bag at a mixed paper drop-off and SWALCO refuses one, because they are describing different machinery
Feeling that composting shreds wastes them. Below about 25 mm2 the fiber has already lost the properties a mill was buying it for