January/February 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
............................ it tells you how
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Here are a few more of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ® syndicated features which have appeared in 100 + newspapers over the past four and a half years.
A number of companies now market machines designed to help you roll your family's old newspapers into "logs" that can be burned in a fireplace or stove. After testing a couple of these devices, I think the idea is a good one for two reasons: > [1] it puts recycling on a real grassroots basis by allowing you to directly convert part of your waste into something useful and [2] it gives you a small, partial answer to today's fuel shortage.
There's no need to shell out good dollars for a "log rolling" machine to realize these benefits, however. Just get yourself a length of old broomstick and start tightly rolling one section of a sheet of newspaper after another around it as shown in Fig. 1. When the "log" is about two inches thick, slip the broomstick out, tie the bundle with light wire, and soak the paper in one pint of charcoal lighter or kerosene ( never gasoline). If you have no other soaking tray, you can make one that will last for years from a sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil (Fig. 2)
Once the rolled paper has soaked up the fluid, wrap more waste newsprint around the saturated core . . . enough to make a log about four to five inches thick. Tie the bundle with light wire and set it aside. Three of these logs will burn all evening in a fireplace.
The relationship between the maximum amount of moisture that the air can hold and the amount of moisture that it actually does contain is called relative humidity. (And we all know—or should know—that the moisture in the atmosphere during the summer makes us swelter quite as much as the heat in the air, just as lack of humidity during the winter can make a room feel much colder than it actually is.)
