1000 New Pets: Worm Composting

Our family has taken up vermiculture, or worm composting, the primary composting method that can work in an apartment.

Basically, it consists of a plastic bin, some shredded, damp newspaper, a supply of red worms, and our fruit and vegetable waste. We obtained our bin and worms from Flowerfield Enterprises, the company founded by the late Mary Appelhof, aka the "worm woman," and author of "Worms Eat My Garbage," which came with our bin. I recommend them highly.

Worm composting can work indoors because it is aerobic, rather than anaerobic, and thus does not produce the offensive odors we usually associate with rotting food. We started our bin about 10 days ago. Since then we have added such yummy articles as mushy carrots, soggy lettuce, old basil, roasted pepper skins, moldy fruit, tomato cores, corn husks, and watermelon rinds. Unlike our garbage can, which in the summer heat smells horrendous after one day, the worm bin smells almost poetically pleasant: phrases such as "a forest after the rain" come to mind.

Worms are extremely low maintenance--for example, you can easily go on vacation for a week or two without worrying about feeding them. You must make sure that the conditions in the bin are okay--not too wet or too dry and adequately aerated. Every few months, you must harvest your worm compost, either by dumping out your worms and separating them from the compost, or by putting new bedding and food on one side of the bin, allowing the worms to migrate, and then removing now mostly-worm free compost.

here is a short list of some of the environmental benefits of worm-composting:
1. it reduces amount of garbage sent to landfills, (including fuel needed to take waste to the dump)

2. it eliminates the methane produced when organic matter decomposes in anaerobic conditions: methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases with more than 20 times the heat-trapping capacity of CO2; a principal source of methane emissions is dumps

3. worms produce compost which increases the organic matter (and stored carbon) in soil, matter that in many parts of the world is being rapidly depleted through soil erosion

4. worm castings are a form of organic fertilizer that can reduce or eliminate the need for traditional fertilizer, which is energy-intensive to produce and causes serious environmental problems from run-off

Earth 911 has an excellent article about the benefits of compost for your plants.


While these benefits are real enough, the environmental effects of a single family's composting efforts are pretty modest. In the scheme of things, it is probably more important--in the sense of directly beneficial to the planet--for people to cut their electricity and gasoline use than for them to compost 500 pounds of vegetable scrapings each year.

Actually, I think the more significant benefits may be mental, but I think these also need to be articulated and defended.

Our worm bin is an ongoing biological experiment that is (to say the least) educational for the children and adults in our house--there is a good reason these bins are popular in schools. It helps educate my children about waste, ecology, "bugs," and the life cycle, among other things.

Even a few short days of composting has made us all newly conscious of what is going in our garbage can and how much we toss out every week; this awareness is a necessary first step to reducing our waste.

Most importantly for me, composting has enabled our whole family to recognize that our vegetable scrapings are not worthless--they do not have to be garbage. They can be put to use. As a society, we treat many things as garbage that actually have value: we just don't bother to discover and acknowledge that value. Rainwater is another example of this--in NYC we literally mix it with our sewage.

We need a new way to think about waste: one meaning of waste is "by-product," whatever is left over from a process--in this case carrot peels from dinner and worm castings from our bin. But another form of waste--the one that injures our minds in the deepest sense--is the destruction of potential.

These kinds of mental shift are absolutely key if we are going to adapt as a society to confront the challenges ahead of us.

Setting Priorities #1: Understand Your Electricity

The recent Live Earth concert series was an inspiring attempt to raise public awareness of global warming and help educate people about reducing their impact. The main problem is still these "save the planet" tips, which though full of our beloved factoids, do not actually help individuals understand where their carbon footprint really comes from.

Americans have become fixated on driving because we are so dependent on our cars and because of the evil “foreign oil.” You will get no argument from me about cutting our oil usage, for security and environmental reasons. But as far as global warming is concerned, coal-generated electricity is the bigger problem: coal pollutes much more per unit of energy than oil or natural gas. In 2006, more than 2.1 billion metric tons of emissions came from coal, or 36% of the total.

As a society, more of our emissions come from oil, but

for the average individual, the energy used in our homes is responsible for more than twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the energy used by our cars.

So first thing’s first: for Americans reducing electricity use should be the top priority, and to do that we need to understand the following:

1. where we use it
2. where we can cut it
3. where it comes from


Over the next few days, Green Factoids will take a look at our electricity use with the help of a handy device that every household should get: the “P3 International Kill-a-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor.” You simply plug your Kill-a-Watt into the outlet and plug your electric device into the Kill-a-watt to learn how many watts the device is drawing.

The device will also tell you the appliance’s kWh, volts, amps and other cool information.

Amazon currently sells the Kill-a-watt for about $23.

Thanks to our favorite blog, Michael Bluejay's Mr. Electricity, for recommending the Kill-a-watt.

Recycled Toilet Paper

Seventh Generation sure does love its factoids:

If every household in the U.S. replaced just one 4-pack of 260 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissue with 100% recycled ones, we could save:

* 988,200 trees
* 2.5 million cubic feet of landfill space, equal to 3,700 full garbage trucks
* 356 million gallons of water, a year’s supply for 2,800 families of four
* and avoid 60,600 pounds of pollution!

Seventh Generation

Product Review: We have been trying out their recycled paper toilet paper (I can barely bring myself to write, let alone say, the phrase "bathroom tissue") which is made from an impressive 80% post-consumer paper. It’s a pretty decent product: the phrase “fluffy as a cloud” does not exactly leap to mind, Charmin style, but neither does “sand paper.” Their paper is nice and sturdy and comes in hefty double rolls that last much longer than some of the earlier types of recycled TP. My only problem is that it is not cheap.

Bamboo Clothing?

It is hard to believe that one of the world’s hardest woods (really a grass) can produce beautiful fabric. More importantly, in contrast to pesticide-intensive cotton, bamboo is easily grown without chemicals.

More factoids about Bamboo from Bamboosa:
Bamboo is of the world's most prolific and fastest-growing plants, and is able to reach maturity in about four years, compared to the typical 25 to 70 years for commercial tree species in the U.S.

Bamboo is nature's most sustainable resource, is grown without pesticides or chemicals, is 100% biodegradable, and naturally regenerative. Bamboo is actually a tropical grass, with an extensive root system that sends out an average of four to six new shoots per year, naturally replenishing itself and growing to heights of 60 feet or more. Some bamboo species grow up to 4 feet per day and can be harvested every 3 to 4 years.

Why Bamboo? on Bamboosa


Product Review:
I bought socks and a tee shirt from Bamboosa, an online retailer of Bamboo clothing. I must say the socks are the softest and most comfortable I have ever worn—at $10 a pair they are competitive with high-end socks like Therlos. The tee shirt has a beautiful drape and sheen, somewhat like top-quality rayon, but the fabric is more breathable and soft. Lands End also sells Bamboo bath towels that are rated a best buy by the Wall Street Journal.

Definitely check out Bamboosa: Bamboosa

Recycled Paper Towels

If every American household replaced 1 regular roll with 1 roll of recycled paper towels, we could save:
933,000 trees
2.4 million cubic feet of landfill space=to 3700 garbage trucks
350 Million gallons of water
59,600 tons of greenhouse emissions
From Seventh Generation

Product Review:
We made the switch. We are not heavy users of paper towels, relying more on dish cloths, but the recyled ones work fine. In a completely unscientific comparison, I wiped down all of my kitchen counters with a dampened Seventh Generation paper towel and a regular one from the proverbial "leading brand." They both handled the counters, stove, microwave, and even some scrubbing of a mysterious dried-on substance; even after I ripped them apart, they both continued to clean without deteriorating into those horrible frayed-paper balls. Also, I find the paper-pulp brown color of the recycled towels to be oddly soothing. I doubt that the recycled ones are as absorbent, but assuming you don't own a new puppy, I think you will find the recycled towels more than adequate.