Taking a bite out of our garbage
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Since our "going green" announcement in April, we've been charging ahead with our slate of eco-initiatives. So far, it's been a relatively easy transition...as long as sharing quarters with hundreds of ravenous creepy crawlers doesn't phase you! Yep, that's right - we've started vermicomposting at FCG.
Becoming office mates with a small army of voracious, earth-dwelling invertebrates all started with our studio's recycling overhaul. The overhaul itself was pretty straightforward. Simple changes such as clear labels and better bins reduced our kitchen waste by about 50%. But despite all this progress, we couldn't help but think of our apple cores, banana peels, and tea bags being trucked away to the landfill. Our solution? Turn that waste into food for 500 new Fleming employees (aka our composting worms).
We looked into a number of composting options, but many had their flaws; they were ugly, expensive, difficult to maintain, or inappropriate for our space. Vermicomposting (the fancy term for composting with worms) is a natural, almost self-sufficient system that requires just a bit of maintenance. Even better, the City of Vancouver subsidizes "worm workshops" to encourage residents to take up this interesting form of waste disposal. So we headed over to the City Farmer demonstration garden to learn about vermicomposting first-hand.
On a beautiful Saturday morning, City Farmer volunteer and "worm expert" Farhat lead us through the steps of setting up and maintaining a worm bin, how to harvest the soil, and plenty of other helpful information. At the end of the workshop each of us received our "worm kit" full of everything we'd need to get started.
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The following Monday, the worms arrived at FCG to great fanfare. After a few introductory workshops with staff, we have happily welcomed this brand new production (or is that destruction?) team. For their part, the worms seem to be adjusting well to our office climate here at FCG - they're happily working weekends and so far they're taking everything we throw at them! Now we just get to look forward to harvesting fresh compost - and hopefully a whole new batch of worms - in a few months.
We still consider ourselves composting beginners around here, so if you have any worm composting stories or tips to share, post a comment below!