Composting worms its way into workplaces

Composting worms its way into workplaces
Monday, April 20th, 2009

By Lori Kurtzman • lkurtzman[at]enquirer[dot]com • April 20, 2009

In the break room of Emersion Design in Norwood, beneath the coffee maker, inside an 18-gallon Rubbermaid container, hundreds of worms feast on coffee grounds and the leftover scraps of workday lunches. Emersion started this - it’s called vermicomposting - about a year ago to cut down on waste.

“We had this brilliant idea that we didn’t need to throw away all of our organic stuff,” said Nikki Marksberry, who works in marketing at the architecture and engineering firm. “So I just went to a local pet store and bought food (worms) intended to be for reptiles.”

As growing concern for the environment is pushing many to find more ways to “think green,” some are going beyond recycling cans and reusable grocery bags. Ensuring their food scraps won’t end up perfectly preserved in a landfill - you can find whole carrots at the dump - a growing number of area residents are investing in compost systems, ranging from large outdoor bins to small, worm-led operations like the one at Emersion.

Attendance has doubled in composting classes held at the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati. Eco-friendly Over-the-Rhine general store Park + Vine has twice sold out of its supply of Happy Farmer indoor kitchen composters. The Hamilton County Department of Environmental Services’ annual sale of outdoor compost bins was such a smash in the fall that even the organizers were shocked.

“For the first time ever, we sold out,” said department spokeswoman Sarah Dowers.

Customers snapped up all 1,500 Earth Machine bins, which retail for $100 and which the county sells for $35. “People were actually upset there were not more to be bought,” Dowers said.

The composting craze even wormed its way to the Wyoming Youth Services Bureau’s annual benefit breakfast last month. Some 900 people tore through thousands of pancakes and gallons of syrup and the amount of landfill-bound trash they generated filled just three garbage bags.

“It was such a good feeling,” said Heidi Spicer, who worked as the event’s “eco-organizer.”

Spicer took table scraps back to her Wyoming home, where she and her husband compost food, leaves and grass and use the resulting organic material to enrich the soil in their fruit and vegetable gardens.

“It’s really simple,” Spicer said.

That’s the refrain from a lot of composters, no matter how they’re doing it. Spicer - who also collects rainwater in an 1,100-gallon tank - has a large system of bins spread throughout her back yard. Jenny Kessler, a University of Cincinnati student who said her roommates “lovingly call me the ‘Green Nazi,’ ” has the compact Happy Farmer and said it’s easy, too.

And at Emersion, the worms do the really hard work. Marksberry loads coffee grounds and decomposing fruit and vegetable waste into the bin weekly.

“You cover it with moist, shredded paper and that’s it,” Marksberry said. “The worms do their thing.”

Every six months or so, when it’s time to unload the bin, Marksberry hauls it home. She dumps the compost - which her fiancé will use in his organic garden - onto her driveway, and picks out the worms. The neighbor kids help