Worm Factory Compact Composting Kits
by Janet Lina, 04/07/09
The uneaten food and food preparation scraps we leave behind after ever meal weigh in as the single-largest component of the waste stream in the U.S. Want to do your part to reduce food waste but don’t know where to start? Washington-based Cascade Manufacturing Sales Inc. designed The Worm Factory, a composting kit complete with almost everything you need to reduce the amount of kitchen scraps, junk mail, and old newspapers you’re sending to the landfills. The Worm Factory promises odorless year-round operation, and with its compact footprint, it can even be used in apartments.
Each year restaurants, cafeterias, and households send 96 billion pounds of food waste to the landfill, and we spend 1 billion dollars a year to do it. Some state governments have encouraged businesses to recover uneaten food for donation and to compost the rest. Some local governments have even offered curbside collection of household food waste.
Composting bins offer an easy way to cut down on household food waste while generating nutrient-rich soil that is perfect for gardening. Unlike other worm composting kits, the Worm Factory keeps the worms separated from the nutrient-rich castings they produce. It does this through a system of stackable trays that keep the worms migrating vertically as food sources are exhausted, leaving the finished compost ready to use.
I use the worm factory and I love it. I live in a condo and it gives me a chance to compost efficiently in a small urban environment. It took a little while to get the hang of it. Too much food given to the worms and you get smell. My big secret is to have air tight compost scrap jars on the kitchen counter handy to pop scrap into. And the jars are exactly as big as what fits into a blender. I keep a special blender and just plop the scraps into the blender and sort of pre-chew the food for the worms. Then just pour the glop from the blender into the worm bin. Because it’s pre-chewed for them they eat it really fast. It speeded everything up so that the amount of scraps we make the amount the worms can eat is equal. The other big tip is to use one of the trays just for gnat/fly prevention. I keep a tray above the worm try full of dried leaves and now I have no gnat/fly troubles anymore. Something about having to navigate through all the leaves makes the flying bugs give up on trying for the compost.