With gnats flitting about his face, Ken Otto pours yellowish slop from a dark green garbage bag into a wooden bin. The unmistakable stench of rotting kitchen waste fills the air in this subterranean pump room, lit by a single overhead bulb. He stops and peers into the bin, then adds another splash of the mushy stuff for good measure. “This is pretty ripe stuff,” he says, pointing with a small flashlight. “That looks like rice. That’s a corncob.”
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He visits the pump room in the basement to measure the worms’ progress about once a week, but he only has to feed them once every four or five months. “The nice thing about this is that you can do it on your schedule, not theirs,” he says. “When I first started, I was so excited, you know, I had to check on the worms every day–just to see if they were still there.”
As the maintenance engineer at the Institute of Cultural Affairs, which occupies several floors of a 1920s-era mid-rise in Uptown, Otto has access to plenty of worm food. He convinced the Institute’s employees–who live in the building–to separate their wet garbage from plastic, paper, and other inorganic waste after meals. The worms can’t keep up with the building’s human residents (Otto just added a fifth bin), so he takes some of the leftovers to his 40-acre Michigan farm, where he’s been doing wormless composting for years.
Worms get all the glory in vermicomposting (vermi is Latin for worm), but it’s their invisible allies–moisture, bacteria, and protozoa–who get first dibs on the waste and help break it down into bite-size parts. “Ten to twenty species of critters evolve out of this ooze,” Otto says. Fruit flies can be an annoyance if you dump too many banana peels or grapefruit rinds, but the mites and the springtails, the white worms and the sow bugs, scorned elsewhere, make good neighbors in a composting bin, where they help break down organic matter. Other assistants are the grains of sand lodged in the worms’ tiny gizzards, and intestinal enzymes, which help the worms absorb the nutrients into their bloodstreams. Undigested materials, such as bacteria, soil, and plant residue, come out the other end, transformed into–voila!–fertilizer.
The week’s feeding complete, Otto returns upstairs to the Institute’s front office. A woman passing through gets wind of the conversation and chimes in “I really think this project is fabulous.” She manages a Lincoln Park apartment building, she says. “We’re not at the worm stage yet, but we ought to be. Yuppies produce a lot of garbage!”
