2/1/2006

Evening Chronicle (Newcastle, England)

By Louise Redvers

Working ponies belong in Tyneside's industrial past.  Now meet the future ( working worms.)

These wrigglers are employed by the Tyneside branch of the Environment Agency to eat up used tea bags, banana skins and cardboard.

And they're certainly earning their keep, getting through a kilogram of office waste a day and producing first-rate garden compost and fertilizer in return.

Human staff at the office on Newcastle's Business Park collect their waste in special containers, putting aside all bio-degradable products like fruit skins, tea bags, cardboard and newspapers.

Workers at the office canteen also join in, saving up food leftovers, egg shells and vegetable peel for the worm tower.

The bins are collected up each day and fed into the three-tier tower for the worms to feed on.

As they eat their way through the waste they produce castings, a rich brown crumbly substance packed full of micro-organisms and nutrients.

A liquid by-product called leachate is also collected, which when diluted can be used as plant fertilizer.

Environment officer Alys Evans explained: "It's so easy to use, all you do is put the waste in trays and they just wriggle their way up through the gaps and eat it.

"We have three trays and about 9,000 earthworms. They get through about one kilogram of waste a day, but will do more in summer because they work better in the warm weather.

"All we do is give them some bedding and some lime tablets in case they have too many pieces of orange peel, to make sure their castings aren't too acid."

The worms in the wormery are Eisenia Fetida, commonly known as tiger worms, redworms or brandlings. They are very different to earthworms but quite popular as fishing bait.

Newcastle City Council currently only recycles 14% of its waste. Its target for next year is 18%, nationally, while the national rate is 23%.

A typical person produces half a ton of waste per year. Around 80% of this goes to landfill, even though up to 60% of household rubbish is compostable.

The Environment Agency works to protect and improve Britain's environment and staff are actively encouraged to recycle, with bins around the offices to collect worm-suitable waste.

Alys said: "Wormeries are also ideal for using in the home, they're very simple to use and you can buy them from pounds 30 and they come with a supply of worms."

Compost produced by the agency's worms is raffled off in aid of Water Aid, a charity helping to give clean water to people in developing countries.