Reusing a bookshelf as a planter
May 7, 2019 7:42 AM   Subscribe

I have an IKEA Billy bookshelf that is no longer useful inside my house (it is broken in a few ways). It has enough structural integrity to lie on its back and be the housing for a garden bed, however. I'm thinking of filling it with soil (maybe lining it with burlap first?) and planting a little garden in it. What are the odds of the fibreboard leaching some kind of toxic bad news into the soil? I'd rather reuse than send to the dump, but I'd rather send to the dump than poison my plants/myself.
posted by lizifer to Home & Garden (11 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
What are the odds of the fibreboard leaching some kind of toxic bad news into the soil? I'd rather reuse than send to the dump, but I'd rather send to the dump than poison my plants/myself.

Probably pretty high, but I think your bigger problem is that the particle board will swell and turn to mush in the rain and you'll no longer really have a garden bed.
posted by Fidel Cashflow at 7:51 AM on May 7, 2019 [17 favorites]


Uh. I’ve built a few garden beds and all the DYI manuals specify that untreated wood should be used. However, liners are available for flower beds, so this might be an option. I would be worried about whatever leaching into the ground (and ultimately groundwater) so poisoning the whole of your yard, so I'd be firmly in the "no" camp here.
posted by Dotty at 7:55 AM on May 7, 2019


I've put particleboard stuff in a trailer to take to the dump/tip and left it there for a few days, and can confirm that it's only marginally better at surviving rain than cardboard.

I don't honestly think it'll be particularly harmful to your soil. About the most toxic thing in particleboard is formaldehyde, and that breaks down really quickly in the presence of air and sunlight.
posted by pipeski at 8:05 AM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


Response by poster: Not to threadsit, but said bookshelf has been outdoors in rain and snow and sun for about three months without turning to mush. A datapoint for anyone reading this who... wants to... build a house? out of bookshelves.

Alright, I will not plant things in this bookshelf. Dang it.
posted by lizifer at 9:02 AM on May 7, 2019


Take heavy black garbage bags and put them in the upturned cubbies. Overlap the sides and staple down. Stab a few dozen holes in the bottom & put an inch or two of pea gravel in each well for drainage. Layer in some moss and soil and away you go. Then maybe surround the whole thing with some heavier lumber screwed together at the corners, and/or berm it up and you've got a raised bed planter that should last for a few years at a minimum.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:44 AM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


Best answer: About the only toxin you're likely to see leaching out of the medium-density fibreboard that Billy bookcases are made of is low levels of formaldehyde from the breakdown of the resin binder that holds the MDF together. Formaldehyde is a very simple non-cyclic organic molecule that readily biodegrades at low concentrations. It's nasty stuff at high concentrations, such as you might find in the air in small poorly ventilated rooms where all the walls, fixtures and fittings are constructed from the crappiest available grade of MDF, but if it's leaching outdoors because of contact between MDF and damp topsoil, the water will break it down and the topsoil will happily eat its breakdown products faster than it has any chance of accumulating or migrating more than a few inches.

Lengthy exposure to water and active topsoil strikes me as a completely responsible way to dispose of unwanted MDF and I would have no qualms at all about eating vegetables grown in a slowly degrading MDF planter.
posted by flabdablet at 12:27 PM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


I’ve built a few garden beds and all the DYI manuals specify that untreated wood should be used.

The "treatment" referred to in those DYI guides will be the chromated copper arsenate anti-fungal treatment commonly used to render softwood lumber made for outdoor applications rot-resistant. That shit is bad news and does leach and bioaccumulate and I would certainly not be happy to eat food grown in planters where it had contact with the growing medium.

There is no CCA in an Ikea bookcase.
posted by flabdablet at 12:31 PM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


That comment says "untreated" flabdablet. To the best of my knowledge they aren't just putting CCA in regular milled lumber - it generally just shows up in "pressure-treated."

I'd not use Billy cases for this - I've owned a number of these, and I've never seen one that's just raw wood. They're almost always stained/coated/painted.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:19 PM on May 7, 2019


Standing in the rain won't be the same as sitting, half buried in soil, wicking up moisture from it.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:33 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


Quite so. I would expect a Billy to start resembling soggy weetbix fairly swiftly once filled with damp topsoil.

If it was propped up off the ground, the thin board in the back would rupture fairly quickly and start letting soil fall out. Even if it wasn't, the board ends with the cunning Ikea hidden jointing fixtures embedded in them would lose all structural integrity within a few weeks, and the corners would all come to pieces.

If I were going to make a Billy into a planter I could expect to hold together for at least a whole growing season, I'd wrap a lot of heavy garden twine around the outside before filling it with soil. It would still swell and bulge and look very sad, but shouldn't completely fall to bits.
posted by flabdablet at 3:36 AM on May 8, 2019


Best answer: maybe surround the whole thing with some heavier lumber screwed together at the corners, and/or berm it up

I think of this as the Stone Soup method, with the Billy bookcase playing the part of the stone.
posted by flabdablet at 3:42 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


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