Burning Papers

[Alan Rutherford]

I've destroyed papers in a 5-gallon bucket with water and a paint-mixing drill attachment. It works well as long as you have nothing but paper. You can then recycle it, make fireplace logs or let it rot. The problem was that there was too much that's not paper. Even if you carefully sort out the envelopes, paper clips and staples, there's all kinds of plastic tape, address labels, stickers, etc.

We have boxes of old business records that can be discarded but it's too much for the periodic free shredding or for us to feed through the shredder. Question: do you need a screen to keep flaming pieces of paper from flying out of the barrel?