You realize how bad your environment is by seeing the largest landfill in your town. It ruins the environment surrounding it, and its just plain ugly to look at. You wonder how you could reduce the amount of garbage in your landfill to improve your environment and benefit everyone. The answer is-worms! Yep, that’s right. Using worms is an easy and cheap way to get rid of your food wastes without it going to the land fill!

This process is called vermicomposting. This is where you feed worms your leftover food wastes, and they use it to make one of the best fertilizers you can get. So you can decrease the amount you throw away, and have good fertilizer for your garden too! Using worms instead of a compost pile allows for faster composting. The best worms to use for this project are Redworms. They can eat half of their body weight in food each day. They can eat almost any vegetable and fruit wastes, such as cores, rinds, shavings, peels, and ends. This project is great for people in apartments too, because it doesn’t take up too much space.

To make your worm compost bin, you need two plastic bins of a good size (dark colored not see-through!), bedding material (such as shredded paper), dirt, spray bottle, and one pound of worms. Worms reproduce fast, so just start off with one pound to be safe. Drill holes into the bottom of one of the bins, and set it inside of the second one. Be sure to leave a tiny bit of space between the two bottoms of the bins for the liquid to have enough room to drain. Then take your shredded paper (bedding material) and make it moist (but not too wet). Pile it 3-4 inches high in your bin with the holes drilled in it. Then put a little bid of dirt in the bin on top of the bedding. Now you’re ready to add your worms! Make sure you leave your worms alone for about three hours before putting your food wastes in their bin so they can get used to their new home. Make sure you add water to the worm bin every now and then because if the dirt and bedding get too dry, it can potentially harm your worms. This is where the spray bottle is your friend. Use this to remoisten your bedding and dirt without making it too wet. Don’t forget that eventually you will have to add more bedding because it will slowly disappear because of the worms. Now you can start adding your left over food wastes after your meals. But be careful. Worms will NOT eat things such as meat, dairy, and bones. They will eat fruit and vegetable wastes as mentioned before, but they also enjoy cornmeal, coffee grounds, and the coffee filters. Give them food slowly at first, and gradually add more as the worms multiply.

Imagine if every single home had a worm bin, it would drastically decrease the need for landfills! Then your community’s environment would be ten times healthier. Get everyone you know to pitch in and help to make the world a better place.