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Compost instructor Andrew Hoyles leads worm workshop at Fort Washington
Library.
by Kristen Bonardi Rapp
Some apartments have mice (eek!) or cockroaches (gross!) and now, thanks to the NYC Compost Project, you could have a new icky thing lurking under your sink: worms.
These worms aren’t pests, though, as compost instructor Andrew Hoyles explained to about 15 Washington Heights kids on Wed., May 12 at the Fort Washington Library. The worms (safely contained in a recycled take-out container) are from the NYC Compost Project in Manhattan, hosted by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and important recyclers.
“Where does our garbage go after we throw it out?” Hoyles asked the group.
“Mexico?” asked one girl.
“No,” said Hoyles, “a little closer than that.”
The girl thought for moment. “Mexico... City?”
Leonardo Mendez, age 9, said his garbage must go to Coney Island. “’Cause it’s already real dirty there,” he explained.
Holyes told the children that the food we throw out – banana peels, orange rinds, and apple cores – goes to landfills, some as near as New Jersey, others as far away as Virginia and Michigan. “Where I’m from,” Hoyles added.
“Michigan looks like a glove, like this!” exclaimed Lyonni Mendez, age 10, holding up her hand.
Hoyles laughed. “That’s exactly right, it does look like a glove.” No matter what state (or its shape) food waste is shipped off to, once it ends up in a landfill, food scraps decompose and release methane, a greenhouse gas which the EPA says is 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.
Rather than throw the food scraps away, Hoyles continued, we can feed these scraps to a bin of worms who will turn the food into compost which can then be used to fertilize new plants, flowers, or vegetables.
As Hoyles handed out a few worms to each child to look at, one thoughtful girl asked how, exactly, do worms turn the food into compost anyway?
“Well, they eat the food and then they... poop it out again,” Hoyles said, and was met with cries of “Eew!” and howls of disgust from the kids.
“I don’t think I want to touch them anymore!” exclaimed one girl.
After the kids touched the worms for a bit – cautiously and squealing with disgusted delight throughout – Hoyles handed out strips of torn newspaper to be soaked and wrung out which would act as bedding and covering for the worms who like their homes to be moist and dark. And the worms’ first meal in their new homes? The rind from an orange Hoyles had eaten for lunch earlier that day.
“I think I’ve also got a turnip in my bag too, that’s gone a little soft,” he added.
Worms can eat their own body weight in food every day, so a pound of worms could easily devour a pound of food scraps per day produced by a household. But for now, Hoyles recommended the kids feeding their worms once a week and only a small amount of food at a time: one apple core or a small part of an orange rind.
Despite their misgivings, by the end of the workshop, Andrew Hoyles seemed to have convinced the kids that no matter how grody the worms may seem, they do an important job to help make Washington Heights – and the rest of the world – a little greener.
If you think you’d like to have a worm bin of your own, the Fort Washington Library is holding a second worm composting workshop on June 23. To register, call the library at 212-927-3533.
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