Waste, Worms, Humus: Vermicycling, Vermiculture, Vermicompost
Portland, Oregon's Metro
The Portland area has what we call a "Regional" Government entity, called Metro. They licence 55
different private hauling companies. My early research shows that Metro is trying to reduce the
food waste going to the landfill, but I see no awareness of the potential for worms to do the job.
My goal here: ramp up Portland's worm bin population and "superquester" large amounts of food waste.
I am trying to understand just how many people are doing worm bins around here. I have pondered
the real-world obstacles to rapid growth of the practice. Presented here and on the forums are
the outlines of a plan to divert some of that food waste into worm bins, and then to get
the castings into gardens all across our beautiful part of the Earth.
Vermicomposting just about has to be the most effective carbon sequestration program
known to man! I think we need to step up our game on it. Have you heard about Distributed Generation? I
am proposing distributed worm-keeping.
This is my own personal Green Initiative, my answer to Obama's call
to service. While it looks like only a commercial entity can make this happen on a large scale, I want
you to know that I'm not in this for the money. I'm putting this out in the public domain with no
precautions for "having my idea stolen", because ideas are cheap, and it is only due to serious effort by
many others that the idea could even be formed. I am a beginner at worm-keeping, but as an Engineer and
Entrepreneur I see an opportunity I want everyone to be aware of.
One of my founding premises for this venture is that for this practice to take hold on a
large scale, it needs to be almost foolproof, offer ongoing benefits, take very little time and
probably most importantly, the mass market does not want to be mucking around up to their elbows in
rotting food. Of course, anyone who has kept a bin knows that dealing with rotting food is minimal and
no big deal, but I think that's what goes through most people's minds when they first envision keeping
a worm bin and a main reason preventing them from doing it.
Sorting it out: Some working definitions
There appears to be three kinds of worm-keeping, depending on the main reason for doing it. Having so
many attributes may have limited folk's efforts to sort this out, but sorting these things out is what
Engineers do, so off I go. If I may offer some informal definitions:
- Vermicomposting
- Maintaining a worm bin for the production of castings and tea
- Vermiculture
- Maintaining a worm bed for the production of worms
- Vermicycling
- Maintaining a worm box for the disposal of food waste
I suspect almost all worm bins actually have multiple purposes, a combination of at least two of those,
and in many cases all three. Once a person finds out how great castings are, they'll likely want to
maintain production, even if they give it away. Worms can breed prolifically under the right conditions,
and new worm bins need starter worms.
Certainly, having the ability to deal with the food waste is cool. These are the three
big reasons as far as I can tell, and I suspect that most individual worm-keepers would be able to tell
you which of the three is primary, for any particular worm box.
It looks like we need a new term that includes all three reasons. Every time I want to use the word "Hobby",
I reject it. What I envision is more of a new habit than an entertaining distraction. Certainly, avid
worm-keepers will have all the attributes of hobbyists, but we're trying to divert mass quantities of food waste,
this is more than a hobby. So if I may, I suggest:
- Vermipractice
- The activity of continuously maintaining worm beds
So before we get into different kinds of worm bins, and which is better for which combined purposes -
I'll be getting into that heavily elsewhere - remember the big picture here from a marketing standpoint.
I jumped ahead when I said it has to be foolproof, easy, fast and clean. There's your marketing study
result: meet those criteria if you want wide adoption.
Getting started with Red Wigglers
This is where we get ready to jump off the old status-quo tracks. Right now, worms are hard to find locally. There
is at least one not-small vermiculture operation - he's in McMinnville, a not-short drive from Portland.
(Great guy, great prices, but no shopping cart.) Other than that, the standard "mail-order" price for worms is
$25 per pound not including
shipping, so right now if you want to start
a worm bin in Portland, you are most likely going to get them over the internet. That just seems silly,
doesn't it? A maximum-green thing like a pound of worms ought to be readily available locally, right?
Maybe the idea of $25 per pound for something sounds too steep to you. But think about it: you are getting
One Thousand Critters, each of which is prepared to perform for you 24/7/365. They don't sleep and they
don't get sick. The price should not bother you, in
my opinion. Vermiculture folks need to stay in business and they cannot if they sell their worms too cheap.
What I have a problem with is having to ship them in. Is that a good way to get thousands of new worm bins
set up in the Portland area? That's the level of impact I'm trying to create here.
A First Stab at Worm Math
One of the most basic Engineering Principles is to carefully define the problem.
If we're trying to eat up as much garbage as possible, and we figure we'll find a happy home for all
the worm castings we could ever produce, then we are talking Vermicycling.
But here's the problem:
If the goal is to eat up, say 45,000 tons of waste food a year, then we need something like 360,000 pounds of
worms in place, in stable worm beds, chowing down food at about the same rate, overall, that we provide it.
(We'll assume for now that one pound of worms eats 350 pounds of food a year.) My preliminary
calculations show that we would need about 354,000 sq meters (3.81 million square feet) of worm bins at a
stocking density of 1.60 kg-worms/m2.
OK take a breath, yes that's a big number. The 45k tons is the ideal amount Metro wants to divert, from all
sources. About half is from businesses. For the purposes of this plan,
I'm looking only at the residential sector
- and I take it that the third
sector is 'institutional' - so let's shoot for something less ambitious than all of that 45k tons, say, 22%.
Let's look at diverting 10,000 tons a year of food waste into worm bins.
That's 10,000 ton * 2000 lb/ton = 20,000,000 pounds.
Divide the year's total by the worm's productivity ratio of 350: 20000000 / 350 = 57142 pounds of worms
= 25919 kg of worms. Divide by the stocking density of 1.60 kg-worms/m2: 25974 / 1.6 = 16200 sq meters or
174400 square feet.
By the way, I am looking at the Residential Food Waste Stream precisely because it is the most difficult.
You can coax and coerce the Restaurant and Institutional folks, but you need citizen buy-in to make this
actually happen. The idea is to crack the toughest nut, and the other sectors won't need coercing - their
solution will have presented itself by that point. Worms are winners.
Hang in there just a bit longer . . . my projected system would set up each established worm-keeper with at
least two bins, 4 square feet total. So that would need 174400 / 4 = 43,600 participants. But what if the
average sq feet per participant was 10 sq ft? Then we would need 17,440 subscribers. But
whatever the number
of square feet per person, we'll need about 175,000 square feet of fully productive worm beds to deal with
10,000 tons of food waste per year.
So there is an initial look at the goal of this venture: Get around 20,000 people signed up on this system;
make it foolproof, continuously beneficial, easy, quick and clean. Mind you, this is the initial
look-see of where we eventually want to go, not the initial
goal. Maybe it takes 4 years to get up to 18k folks.
Grabbing some numbers out of thin air:
500 after the first year
4000 after the second year
10000 after the third year
18000 after the fourth year
President Obama once said "I'm an Optimist, but that doesn't mean I'm a sap". I'm the same way. 4000 locations
after the second year? Who am I kidding?
My response: it's a longshot, but the timing is very good. It's worth a shot. If the numbers come up short in
the end, so be it. But how miserable of a failure can it be? Surely I will at least get a few worm bins going
that never would have existed otherwise. That will be good enough.
The Plan: Distributed Vermiculture of Red Wigglers
All this and I still haven't explained the plan. But you see the situation I'm looking at now, so I can move on
to how it would work.
I'll explain from the point of view of a theoretical customer. I'll call her Wanda.
This is all in the future. Wanda finds our site and
decides to go for it. She goes through a wizard to learn about her circumstances. The results of the wizard
steer her to one of the many choices of bins and from that we can custom configure a
starter kit. Wanda chooses the
standard 6 month membership,
and goes online or local and she buys one of those nice worm bins with the plastic trays.
The membership provides 'tech support' for Wanda's worm bin,
but it goes much farther than that. When we look
at her profile, we see that Wanda is in it for the castings, mostly. She digs the superquestering thing
and all that, but she has signed up in order to get all that "instant humus" into her gardens. Now, normally,
a new worm-keeper would
have to wait at least three months for castings. Plus she does NOT want to dig
though garbage. Rich soil for her is great, but as a beginner, Wanda does NOT want to turn the worm bed any more
than absolutely needed.
So Wanda wants castings and tea and wants to be a part of this system. She forks over some cash.
She gets a kit and very specific instructions.
She also gets a container of castings and a bit of Tea as part of her membership.
The kit has stuff like rock phosphate, lime, grit and such. If instead Wanda was
building a bin from plans from the Wormgineer, her membership kit would also include parts for that (the
stuff not easily found locally in the quantities needed; screening for example). Wanda gets to rock and roll in the
garden right off the bat and
she sets up two worm bins. Yes, two.
She sets up her personal bin - the plastic tray
model. It will start producing castings in a few months, and by the time her membership expires, she'll be
totally good to go.
Wanda's Vermicomposting set-up is designed to produce castings. As the bin gets more established, it will produce
at a greater rate. But it will be a long time before it reaches its potential for chowing down food waste. The
castings are great for Wanda, but if we're going to divert a lot of food (10,000 lbs per year) from the landfill,
we need her to help us out
with something.
Ramping up our Vermicycling Capability
Remember all those square feet of worms we're gonna need? And that I was talking about the
average keeper having 10 square feet? To do that, we need to
raise a LOT of worms.
We need 57,000 pounds of worms. That's $1.4 Million worth of worms at retail price! So we find that to
do Vermicycling at this level, we need to run a massive
Vermiculture operation,
and somehow do it cheap enough so that the subscription service fees keep the business above water.
We need massive quantities of worm bins set up for Vermiculture, but first we need to raise up as many
as we can as fast as we can.
Then we need to convert those worms to Vermicycling duty,
and keep them fed from the diverted waste stream. As far as Vermicomposting
goes, we will be producing mass quantities of castings, and we'll need to work out the details
of distributing them. Having too much "Instant Humus" would seem to be one of those excellent problems to
have, so I expect that we'll come up with something cool.
If I'm right, and I'll be starting experiments soon to find out (today is March 16 2009), we can set up a standard
plastic-tote worm bin for hatching baby worms that can be set up once and then left alone (except for
monthly checks and feedings) for 3 - 4 months. After this period of time we ought to have a large population of worms
ready to be turned into a bin designed for Vermicycling (shallower and packed with worms).
Getting back to Wanda, she paid her membership fee, got her kits, got her questions answered, got her castings and tea,
and did us the favor of setting up a standard hatchery bin.
Each member must set up at least one hatchery, and some do
several. We try to get them all set up exactly the same way. Once set up, the member keeps the bin for 4 months in
a heated space. Each month the Worm Tech comes in and checks all her bins. All Wanda has to do is house at least one
hatchery bin and let the tech look at it monthly. She can do what she wants with her personal bin, but she can also
let us do the driving for the first few months.
When the time comes,
we come and get the hatchery bin.
If Wanda wants to graduate from vermicomposter to vermicycler, by maintaining a maintain a second, standardized
Vermicycling bin, the worms stay with her. If not,
no problem, but we'll be
needing those worms elsewhere: hatchery bins are emptied into cycling bins, and the little wrigglers are
ready to continuously dispose of food. Of course, if Wanda wants to
start another hatchery for us, super. We'll still come by monthly to make sure our worm pipeline is in good shape.
The alert reader will have a question at this point. (It's a shame if I've put you to sleep, because we have arrived at the
central tactic of this whole shebang.)
How do you set up standard bins
when the waste stream is made up of whatever scraps
happen to be around? Answer:
Standardize the worm's food.
How do you do that?
By collecting the scraps
from many people, mixing it up,
and distributing to worm bins.
The details of doing that are on the Waste Page. The
main idea is that a mixture of wastes from a large enough population will remain quite uniform in nutritional
value and even in the proportion of different foods. There will be seasonal variations, but we can track that as
well as we perfect the system.
To summarize my proposal as it stands today:
Create explosive growth of Vermicycling by the establishment of a
worm-bin subscription service which insures newcomers are successful and immediately gives them the benefits of
the practice, while employing their location to breed the worms we'll need to support that growth. The subscriber
will keep at least 2 worm bins, their personal one and one of ours. They set up our bin for us, following our
directions closely, and we supply the food waste in a semi-standardized form.
The 'Waste' page covers the logistics of making the standardized food thing happen.
