Rarely do printers use anything other than soy ink today.
I use all kinds of printed paper in the garden.

sylvia

ps: How do you keep paper mulch from blowing away?
I usually either compost paper, or put another kind of mulch on top of it.

Don't use the glossy flyers (slicks).

Call the newspaper office and ask if ALL their inks - both black and color - are soy based. If so, no problem.

I have saved hours of weeding time this year by using newspaper. I don't even shred it. I just placed it 4 layers thick around my plants (flowers and vegetables).

wet the paper and it conforms to the area better, stays in place better, etc. Don't use colored fliers. Use office paper or newspaper.

I put a layer of mulch over the shredded paper or newspaper layer to make it neat and keep it in place.

Place cardboard on top of the soil. If you first wet it with a garden hose, it's easier to rip in order to make a better fit around the plants.
Carry a bucket of water along with your bag of shredded paper. Fill the bucket with as much paper as it can comfortably handle. Scoop out handfuls of soggy paper and place them on the cardboard in clumps. Something happens when the paper placed this way dries: it's almost glued together and it doesn't fly away.
I cover the paper with grass clippings (I add throughout the summer) because I don't like the look of whitish-grey flowerbeds.
Works great.

I just realized: my answer is for SYLVIA TEXAS, not the original poster.

Thanks!

Many of the garden sites I visited seem to think that all ink today is made from soy. This is a gross misconception. Soy inks are no safer than conventional oxidizing sheetfed inks. The only difference in the two is the type of vegetable oils used as pigment vehicles. The driers (cobalt and manganese) and the colored pigments are the same. These are the hazardous materials in the ink formula that could leach out of the soil into the ground water. Newsprint using black ink is the safest to use. The ink used is only solvents, veg oil,tree resin and carbon black.

I just posted on another thread about this.

superiorinkco registered March 21, 2007,
has posted 3 times, all on Frugal Gardening,
all almost identical in wording,
all reviving threads started in 2005,
all sounding very technical.

The best forum I know of for technical discussions of ink in the compost is the Soil Compost & Mulch Forum.

Here is a link that might be useful: superiorinkco's posts