Reaching for Zero Waste

A worm bin can be made out of almost anything, but I went for an easy to use commercial option.

My job growing up on the farm from the time I was big enough to drag a garbage bag across the yard, was to carry the trash from the house, a few hundred yards, back into the trees where, like most farms, we had a pit for burning trash—all those years setting fire to plastic bags of rubbish and seeing what remained afterward created in me a lifelong desire to throw away as little as possible. 

Returning to owning a house after years in an apartment means that we can again have a compost bin and a worm bin. Between the two, much of our organic waste, including paper and everything but oily cooked food and meat, is easy to compost or put in the worm bin. With joy, I have noticed how we reduce our weekly trash by half by putting paper waste and food in compost.

The downside of living in an apartment is that there are no avenues for composting, and a worm bin in close quarters can be a stretch. However, compared to some of the stinky dogs, cats, and especially reptiles that people keep, a worm bin, if properly balanced, smells like fresh earth. It is interesting to think about things when one examines our cultural biases for and against certain things.

If you think about what happens to food and organic wastes when they go to the landfill, it should be banned everywhere, especially since the fix is so easy and produces the end product of fertile soil. Besides being gross, down the road, food wastes are prodigious generators of greenhouse gasses, and paper wastes take up vast amounts of space for no reason. Just like garbage pickup, in some places, there is compost pickup, leaving space in the landfill for actual waste. While as a home dweller, I am excited to get back to keeping my waste stream in-house where I can create my own fertile soil, a community system would be more efficient and allow the majority who don't have the space or desire to compost to reduce their waste. While the worm bin will keep going in the garage over the winter, the compost will all but stop outside because the cold will stop biologic activity.  I will have to see how piling and layering carbons and nitrogens over the winter works so that in spring it will become activated again without being a mess. A community system would have such volume that it would keep generating heat with thermophylic bacteria all winter.

The inside with the right balance of carbon to nitrogen smells just like fresh earth. I have already moved excess worms to the compost bin and will see how well they do there. One day, I hope to have chickens for which worms are a great food source.

The best thing about our compost and worm bin is that they force us to think more about our waste. My daily questions are: is this safe for the worm bin? Can this go in the compost? In our our everyday life things such as bleached white paper, towels with their chlorine content, are questionable for worm bins. It is one thing to bleach printing paper, but we don't need bleached white paper to wipe our butt or clean up spills. Deciding what does and doesn't go into the worm bin or compost forces us to be much more deliberate about what we throw away. Everything is waste or resource, and that thinking pushes us more and more toward everything being a resource as time goes on. The question becomes: how can we use this in a new way? 

The next thing the two bins do is they cause us to think differently when buying food, paper or other organic items. Can we use the scrap cuttings or leftovers? Does this packaging have plastic, so it can't be composted? Like the cardboard Qdoba burrito bowl I buried in the compost pile yesterday or its paper fast food bag, I tore into strips to put in the worm bin, thinking about waste as a resource impacts what we consume at the point of purchase. Everyone should have a compost bin for that reason.

 I have always been a big admirer of those who seek to be as zero waste as possible. Those who show off their small jars full of the few items they have to throw away are to be emulated. If you live in larger urban areas that have stores that cater to package free buying it is much easier than in a rural edge of the world place like we live in. Americans, especially, are too quick to throw things away. In other countries, especially the Philippines, where I have spent considerable time, I am always amazed at the resourcefulness of people to create beautiful things out of waste products we think nothing of throwing away. I want to go back and buy one of the beautiful handbags made out of colorful sachet packets that here we have no choice but to throw away. It is that mindset in the rich, overstuffed world that we need to take on. Maybe, one day we will get there.