In
early spring 2011, CREC and Dungannon Intermediate
School teamed up on a pilot worm bin project. Anna Hess and Mark
Hamilton spearheaded the project, building the worm bin and buying
worms and supplies. Staff at Dungannon Intermediate School were
extremely helpful, teaching students to separate food waste from
plastic and then storing the food scraps for weekly pickup.
Between February 19 and
April 27, the worm bin project saved
1,226 pounds of food waste from the landfill. Unfortunately, the
experiment was ultimately a failure for an unexpected reason --- the
worms wouldn't eat the scraps! Worms love most food scraps, but
they couldn't digest much of the processed, starchy foods that
dominated the school's trash cans.
For more information on
the project, read the plan, the
initial letter to the school, how
to weigh several weeks of scraps to get an idea of the school's
average output, calculating
how many worms we'd need, buying
worms locally, building
a large worm bin, filling
the worm bin, feeding the
worms, weekly
maintenance, initial
success after one month, and eventual
reasons for failure.