Happy Earth Day Everyone!

April 22, 2008

Although I’m not some extreme environmentalist, I do like to do what I can, where I can. Not to mention that I don’t like waste. Although we didn’t do it for earth day, we recently created a worm bin.

What’s a worm bin you ask? It’s pretty simple really, you take a container of some sort, fill it with wet newspaper (you can see the dry stuff in the picture to the left), and then you put worms in it.

The worms will eat the paper, and cardboard too, but the best part, is they will eat your food waste too.

When I say food waste, I mean vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, coffee filters, tea bags, etc. You don’t want to put cooked food, meats or animal waste in there though.

  The fancy name for this is either worm composting, or vermicomposting. If you’re interested, just do a search for “Worm Bin” at  your favorite search engine. Here are some plans to make a set just like mine.

The bins I made were made out of 3 10 gallon Rubber Maid containers, and I think in total the materials cost a whopping 15 dollars. Now to be honest, I did hire some shady contractors to do the work, and they wanted to be paid in cookies. So I didn’t include cookie costs in the project budget.

We purchased our red worms from “Uncle Jims Worm farm” and those were the most expensive part of the project, they were $20 for 1000 of them (free shipping).

So far, everything is working out great. I’m waiting for the worms to catch up to the food supply though.

Once the worms are done chewing up all that food, the “castings” (what we call poop) can be harvested, and used to provide some terrific nutrition for you lawn, vegetable garden, or even your house plants.

The way I see it, you already bought all of that food, coffee and tea, why not get a little more use out of it, and save some landfill space while you’re at it.

Also on Port 16:

Posted in environment, EarthDay, Projects