Worms in your apartment! And they're not the gummy kind!

Aurelia Kaelin takes good care of her pets. She has a special box for them to snuggle in. Even though she keeps thousands of pets in her apartment, they don’t make a sound. No one complains. Like a growing number of New Yorkers, Kaelin keeps worms.

The red wrigglers eat food trash and poop it out as compost that Kaelin uses to fertilize her plants. “Those little worms especially love cantaloupe,” said Kaelin, who volunteers at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, where she teaches others about the joy of worms.

The center’s work with worms has been catching on. Its outreach to environmentally-concious city folks includes hosting how-to workshops and running a worm hotline. The center also staffs a stand at the Union Square Greenmarket where people dump their edible trash in bins that are later trucked to the organization’s headquarters at The East River Park near FDR Drive.

“It’s much better when people take responsibility for the waste they create,” said project manager Carey Pulverman. “It’s like the lowest-hanging fruit. It’s one of the easiest things to start doing if you want to make any ecological difference.”
The worms only eat certain types of food garbage – vegetable and fruit scraps. But even feeding them scraps has a significant impact because “organic waste makes up a very larger portion of our trash,” said Colin Jerolmack, who teaches at NYU’s Environmental Studies Program.
That’s only the beginning of the impact that these slippery “pets” can have. If they eat garbage, there’s less trash that smells, which means changing means changing plastic trash bags less often. That in turn, means fewer plastic bags in our landfills. Plus, “newly acquired habits can be contagious in a social network,” Jerolmack added. “So it’s probable that at least some New Yorkers who begin in-house composting will become more likely to adopt other environmentally beneficial practices like recycling batteries.”
Keeping worms isn’t difficult. But do they need specific tender loving care, explains Andrew Hoyles, the center’s compost educator. The worm of choice is the red wriggler, which can be bought by phone or online. Two pounds of them – that’s about 2,000 worms – can eat one pound of scraps per day. They will live happily in a specially-designed plastic “worm condo” bin that the center sells for $55 (worms included). Worms like people-friendly temperatures (50 to 80 degrees).

Their bin will never smell as long as their diet is limited to fruit and vegetable scraps, egg shells, coffee, and carbohydrates like bread and cereals. To prevent fruit flies from breeding in the box, fruit should not be fed to the worms until it has first been washed, frozen or microwaved. Worm keepers can get help for specific problems by calling into the Ecology Center’s “Compost Hotline” at the Ecology Center. The main purpose of the hotline is to keep people composting, though they’re facing a few issues.
The most common questions worm owners have are how to deal with bins gone wrong due to improper ventilation. As for the people that shudder at the concept of thousands of worms in a box next door, Caroline Kruse, the development director, has an answer for them.
“If you compost correctly, there is no issue. It’s your own apartment, and people have no cause to complain about you. For example, if you live in an apartment complex that doesn’t allow cats or dogs, is it necessary to notify your landlord and neighbors that you’ve bought a fish? So what problem could there be with a box of contained worms?”

For more information:
http://www.lesecologycenter.org/