FYI: The last published work of Charles Darwin, published in 1881 (more than 20 years after "On the Origin of Species"), was a monograph titled "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.

 Worm power

Worm composting program teaches schoolkids how to reduce organic wastes

By Stacey Warde

Lugging a bucket full of nearly 20 pounds of slop from the school cafeteria, 10-year-old Giovanni LoCascio–Worm Master Gio–draws the usual curious stares from fellow-students returning to class after lunch.

"There's the worm guy," says a boy to his friends as they watch Gio bravely waddle his way to Teach School's garden, where he'll dump the food waste into a worm bin.

Moments later, huffing and puffing as he wields a turning fork to dig a foot-deep trench for the uneaten leftovers, the seasoned young gardener says, "It's back-breaking, Worm-Master labor."

Gio proudly bears the "Worm Master" moniker bestowed upon him by his fifth-grade teacher, Modeana Lamphier, as part of the worm composting program introduced at the SLO school last fall.

"He showed the most interest in the worms, so we chose Gio to be in charge," Lamphier says.

The school received a grant from SLO County's Integrated Waste Management Authority to begin recycling food waste through vermiculture–using worms, specifically red wrigglers, to transform food waste into nutrient-rich compost. The program is part of an effort to comply with a 1989 state mandate to reduce the amount of waste going to landfills.

Assembly Bill 939, passed in 1989, mandated a 50 percent reduction in the amount of waste sent to California landfills by the year 2000. According to Bill Worrell, director of SLO County IWMA, the county diverted at least 51 percent of its waste by the deadline.

The focus now is on reducing organic wastes, according to Cary Yamashiro, a worm composting consultant who with his partner Tim Bolander has helped build worm bins at several SLO County schools. Food waste, Yamashiro says, needs to be eliminated from our landfills.

"We've done a pretty good job of recycling plastics, metals, and paper, but we've given very little attention to how to get rid of food wastes," which, he adds, make up about 25 percent of what goes into the landfills.

Additionally, says Bolander, discarded food makes up about 20 percent of the solid wastes that end up in sewage treatment plants. Such food waste can easily be dealt with instead through composting programs such as those he’s helping introduce into area schools, he says. He adds that cities such as Pismo Beach, which are seeking ways to cope with excessive solid wastes, could ease the pressure on their treatment facilities if more households began composting.

Yamashiro and Bolander, with the support of SLO County's IWMA, have visited a dozen or so area schools to build composting beds.

"They helped us build our worm bins and to modify our garden," says Teach School Principal Joyce A. Hunter. "It's a really neat program, which we've included as part of our education process."

The worm composting program in the schools is a happy marriage between the science of growing things and teaching children to be socially and environmentally responsible.

Indeed, one goal of the school program is to influence parents to initiate similar practices at home. Another is to get children to think about the impact they have on the environment. By the time they're adults, Bolander says, these children will have established more reliable recycling skills and habits than their parents.

"We want to impress kids at an early age so that composting won't be a foreign idea to them when they're older," he says.

Bolander said he and Yamashiro hope to establish gardens in all local schools, giving them have direct access "to the population we want to reach."

* * *

A few years ago Bolander, then working through the Terra Foundation (a nonprofit organization founded by the late Ed Ward, a Cal Poly professor much concerned about the environment), tried to teach the public about worm composting through advertising and workshops. He even gave away composting bins. But acquainting people with composting via his workshops wasn't cost-effective. The expense of advertising in newspapers and on radio and TV was prohibitive.

So about two years ago, with the help of the IWMA, Bolander turned to the schools. The IWMA had been working with schools since 1995, when it helped them set up recycling programs. Later IWMA managers realized that recycling could be taken a step further by composting food scraps and green waste.

State Senator Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch) recently introduced a bill that would require school districts to comply with stringent standards for eliminating solid wastes. Districts would be required to come up with solid waste reduction plans for approval by California's Integrated Waste Management Board. Torlakson’s bill will be considered by the Committee on Education on April 25.

The idea behind getting into the schools now, says Bolander, is to effect significant social change by changing the way we think about garbage and waste.

So many Americans, he notes, stubbornly persist in the idea that it's their right to toss whatever they please into the garbage: "I pay for it, so I'll throw it out if I feel like it." Other people just don't want to be bothered with the work it takes to recycle.

Bolander, who concedes that vermicomposting hasn't worked for some people, says charges he’s heard that the promotion of worm bins is a scam are unfounded. It's more likely that people who tried worm composting without success failed because they didn't take time to understand the process.

"Problems usually occur when people try to feed too much into the worm bins," he says. "It's not a washing machine that you can just throw something into. It's biological. You have to understand that it's an ecosystem."

Mike di Milo, head of school-based education programs for the IWMA, agrees."It's not easier. It's definitely not like throwing your waste into the garbage." It takes more care and effort, and some people find that unpalatable, he says.

Unfortunately, says Bolander, change isn't likely to occur until there's a financial incentive. When the cost of waste disposal makes it expensive to toss out scraps, people will begin to think about alternatives.

Although SLO County has responded well to recycling, much work still remains, he says. He estimates that we could divert a further 80 percent of the waste that's going to our landfill if we were more conscientious. At least that much or more of the schools' waste could be diverted, he adds, if schools began taking a more active role.

A recent audit of waste at C.L. Smith, for example, concluded that the school "could probably save about $4,000 a year by really being careful about recycling and composting" and reducing the number of weekly waste pickups, Bolander says.

Bolander believes that similarly significant savings could be realized at every school in the county. If all 17 of San Luis Coast Unified School District’s schools participated in vermiculture composting and recycling plans, Bolander says, extrapolating from the C.L. Smith and other audits, the district could realize a total annual savings of $80,000 in pickup fees alone. He presented a proposal earlier this month to San Luis Coastal Unified School District in which he hopes to generate support for worm composting at all the district's schools.

Bolander is looking beyond schools. Eventually, he said, he’d like to see restaurants required to compost food waste on site, which he says can be done with containers easily housed in limited space.

* * *

By teaming up with the SLO County IWMA, Bolander and Yamashiro have already begun making an impact in recycling organic materials, particularly food thrown out after lunch at school.

Di Milo introduced Teach School's students to the basics of vermicomposting in a 45-minute class presentation, a presentation he offers to all the schools involved in the program. It's up to individual teachers to take the program from there, says Mary Zirm, who teaches at Baywood Elementary in Los Osos. Zirm says some teachers integrate materials on gardening, composting, and worm-farming into the science and literature curriculum.

During each of di Milo's presentations he sets up a small starter worm bin in the classroom. About a month later, with much fanfare–poems, storytelling, and worm songs–the worms are ceremoniously moved to larger outside bins near raised garden beds.

Di Milo and two other presenters, June Jones and Staci Kawa-Thompson, make about 330 classroom presentations per school year on recycling, on making recycled paper, and on composting with worms. Of those, approximately 50 focus on vermicomposting.

Additionally, every year di Milo leads some 70 field trips to the Cold Canyon landfill and recycling facility on Highway 227 south of SLO. The IWMA pays $4 per student to schools that choose to participate in the vermicomposting program. At least half of a school’s teachers must agree to participate in the program before the school can receive funding, according to the IWMA's Worrell.

Although recycling programs were started in the schools in 1995, he says, schools didn't have the money to sustain recycling efforts on their own. "So we started the grant program," Worrell explains. The IWMA set aside $120,000 this year to provide grants to county schools. "We've planned it so that we can grant money to every school that requests it."

So far, ten local public schools have begun worm composting. San Luis Coastal Unified Schools participating are Teach, C.L. Smith, and Bishop's Peak Elementary in SLO, Baywood Elementary in Los Osos, Morro Elementary in Morro Bay, and Bellevue—Santa Fe in Avila. Participating Lucia Mar Schools include Oceanview and Paulding in Arroyo Grande and Grover City Elementary. Lillian Larsen Elementary in San Miguel is also a participant. Recently, administrators at Grover Heights Elementary in Grover Beach, North Oceano, Harloe Elementary and Arroyo Grande High School have expressed interest.

Atascadero Unified School District, meanwhile, recently purchased its own garbage truck, eliminating its reliance upon Wil-Mar Disposal and significantly reducing its garbage and recycling costs. The district chose to manage its own waste and recyclables in an effort to be more environmentally responsible and to reduce costs, according to Stu Stoddard, director of facilities at Atascadero Unified School District.

"We got into recycling not only because it's the right thing to do but also because it's cost effective," Stoddard says. "We've found that doing it ourselves, we have had significant luck in decreasing the amount of waste we send to Chicago Grade," the landfill in Atascadero."

The district recently began composting its green waste and will do the same with food wastes in the near future, hauling them to "one of our rural properties" for composting, says Stoddard.

* * *

Every day, as part of his duties, Worm Master Gio observes nearly 200 of his fellow Teach School students as they dispose of their leftovers after lunch. He makes sure they put recyclables in the appropriate containers. Almost as soon as they arrive, the students begin lining up near the recycle station to dispose of their leftovers–paper bags, milk cartons, aluminum cans, plastic wrappers, and uneaten food.

Gio keeps a close eye on the disposal process. He grabs a paper sack out of one of the containers and tears into it.

"You've gotta check the paper bags because you never know what's inside of them," he explains.

Reaching inside the bag, Gio retrieves a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a plastic bag of pretzels.

"I think people should eat more of their lunches," he says tersely as he tosses the bag and its contents into the "junk" bin.

Peanut butter and jelly aren't acceptable food waste for the worms, he says; "too much oil." Fresh fruits and vegetables are best.

A young girl unthinkingly drops lettuce and an orange slice into the trash container–the wrong receptacle, she learns immediately.

"You should have put that in the food waste!" Gio informs her. And so it goes.

The process gives Yamashiro and Gio an opportunity to teach students how to deal with their trash and recyclables.

One student starts to throw a milk carton into the recycle bin, certain that he knows what he's doing. Gio tells him to put it in the trash.

The boy protests: "You always put milk cartons in the recycle!"

Not anymore, Gio says. Yamashiro explains because of their wax content milk cartons are no longer recyclable, but says the boy would have been right only a day or so before.

John Ryan, facility manager at Cold Canyon, explains that what determines the recyclability of materials "is not a static thing. It's really quite dynamic." Many people think that once an item is recyclable, it's always recyclable, he says. That's simply not true. The markets dictate what Cold Canyon can recycle. If there's a market for the recycled material, it gets processed. If not, it goes into the trash. Businesses that turn used glass, fiber, or aluminum into reprocessed product, for example, create markets for recyclables, he says.

In the case of milk cartons, Ryan explains, a high-density polyethylene–the wax-like coating on the cartons–makes processing them difficult and costly. Thus there's no longer a market for empty milk cartons.

At Teach School, meanwhile, the students pass by and receive the latest updates and recycling instruction from the Worm Master and his mentor before running off to the playground for the remainder of their lunch break.

As the cafeteria empties, Gio and Yamashiro begin to sort the lunchtime debris and weigh it for their third and final audit of the school's disposal habits. In 20 minutes or so, nearly 30 pounds of waste have been generated from one meal. Just over 18 pounds of it is food waste, which Gio will carry to the worm bins behind the school.

"Stinks, doesn't it?" Gio says wryly as he lifts the bucket off the scale. Æ

Stacey Warde is a regular freelancer at New Times and is not afraid to dig in the garbage for good stories.