Red Wiggler Delight

In mid-October, my roommate, Grant, and I started a worm bin. A worm bin? In your apartment? Oh, yes, my friends.

Before we even decided to live together, the condition for being my roommate (other than being willing to accept all of my insanities and quirks) was that we would have an indoor vermi-compost system in our apartment. Grant obliged. I've been wanting to do it for years but didn't have the drive to do it and/or didn't want to offend a roommate by introducing worms into our already-established environment. Well no more!

Vermi-composting, besides being a great way to avoid stinky garbage (since all of the stink-causing stuff goes into the worm bin), is also a great way to help reduce greenhouse gases. Rotting food accounts for somewhere around 16% of our residential greenhouse gas emissions [Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions April 2007]. This is because a) we throw away way too much edible food and b) because food is put in the garbage, and therefore a landfill, where it is then anaerobically decomposed. This anaerobic decomposition produces Methane, which, as you know is pretty deadly stuff and toxic us and to our environment. The worms, on the other hand, along with some helpful bacteria and other microbes break down the food waste aerobically, which doesn't produce the toxic gases.

And not only that, but when it's time to harvest my precious worm castings, my plants (and probably the tree outside too) will be extremely happy. I turned my waste into liquid gold for my little plant friends. My garbage will turn into next season's rosemary, sage, basil and whatever else we want to grow!

If you still think living with worms is gross and you have a backyard, it works there too (and you don't have to deal with worms or rotting food inside). Or, if you're still thinking it's not for you, you could at least buy the stuff. (What, buy worm poop?) Well, yes. There is a lovely company called TerraCycle that composts food by getting paid to take it out of the waste stream (brilliant business model, eh? not only do they not pay for their raw materials, but they get paid to take them). They take this garbage and feed it to their worms and then package the castings into all re-used containers. Not recycled, re-used. It's pretty cool. You can get it in regular stores, it's less expensive than the toxic alternatives, and their advertising indicates that plants grow better with TerraCycle than with their more toxic counter parts. Try it! (Plus they have a ton of awesome community building projects that are built into the business.)