Worms Working on Waste

If all goes well, the 300,000 worms that went to work at Santa Monica College on Monday will consume 150 pounds of food waste every day, producing in turn a rich organic fertilizer the college may eventually be able to sell for a profit.

But this latest experiment in composting with Red Wiggler worms required a $60,000 investment upfront, and at the project’s dedication Monday, most speeches about it were somewhat conditional in tone.

It’s an exotic idea that has been tried in only a few other places in the past seven years, but in what is sometimes called “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica,” there is probably more enthusiasm for new ecology than in most locales.

This is a school where the grounds manager, Tom Corpus, is able to boast of reducing the waste disposal bill from $100,000 a year to about $35,000 through elaborate recycling projects.

But the “vermicomposting site” that was dedicated Monday behind the school cafeteria is probably the most ambitious project yet.

“We are eager to see what the results will be,” said Santa Monica College President Piedad F. Robertson at the ceremony that featured servings of fresh carrot cake and distribution of small bags of fertilizer as giveaways.

The city of Santa Monica appropriated $25,000 for the project. A matching $25,000 grant came from the Esper A. Petersen Foundation. And the college put up $10,000 for an awning and electrical connection system.

The hope is these costs will be recovered within two years through savings in waste disposal, use of the home-grown fertilizer on the grounds of the school and commercial sales of the fertilizer.

There are 300 pounds of worms--1,000 worms to the pound--sold to the project by Simply Worms of Playa del Rey. They are living in what is known as a Vermitech machine, a metal structure 19 feet long by 7 feet wide by 5 feet high that is temperature controlled and contains some dirt-like material.

Another machine shreds the food waste and some cardboard and dumps it into the mass of worms, which consume it and drop from the bottom of the machine “castings,” the organic fertilizer.

The fertilizer can be converted into something called worm tea, which can be used as a bug deterrent.

The worms will reproduce in 28 days and can double their population in 90 days. But they will definitely not out-reproduce their controlled environment and overrun the campus, promised Chris Wilson, the operator of Simply Worms.

“I will call you if anything goes wrong,” said campus recycling coordinator Briena S. Casares. “But I expect it to go well.”

The worms, said Bill Selby, coordinator of the college’s Center for Environmental and Urban Studies, will eat almost anything, except for metal, glass, plastic, rubber and Styrofoam.

Santa Monica College presently recycles about 37% of its waste, mainly paper and cardboard, beverage containers, green waste, and construction and demolition material. The worms will be its first venture into recycling food waste, which accounts for about 7% of its overall waste.

Selby said the project will also be a learning tool for students--that is, when it isn’t under lock and key behind a fence, to be sure no one succumbs to the temptation of picking up the worms and taking them home.