Wood Worm Farms

Recently I've read this wonderful book.
What a tremendous work is done by the author!

I've got answers to many of my questions:
How the garbage is buried and burned.
How recycling programs and plants work.
How the sewage is treated and where the results go.
How municipality composting programs function.
How and why people try to reduce their environmental footprint.

But the book with all it's references and numbers raised another big question:
How it's possible to stop the garbage invasion having an exponential increase rate of the human population and industry from one side
and linear increase rate of garbage processing abilities from another?

The author tries to understand the reasons for such a sharp increase in a garbage "production".
All those reasons, as far, as I understand have more or less historical roots:
- Plastics were discovered and mastered before biodegradable materials.
- Paper industry was strong since the times of a big need in paper and continues to work like this.
- Paints, fertilizers and industrial chemicals could be made less harmful, but old technologies are well developed and there is no big pressure to change them.
- Even computers could be (in some extent) biodegradable.

Like in any normal historical conflict, another famous question returns: "To be or not to be?".
It's clearly impossible to tame the explosion with fire extinguishers.
So what? Just let it go in a "natural way"? I mean die out?

This is exactly what our garbage is bringing us for.

As usually, a good weapon against the historical anachronisms is a political pressure.
To have this pressure we need many supporters, who understand the problem.
We need to be more politically active, if we want to live...

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Each season has it's good sides. This winter in Quebec is specially lucky
for snow. I always use melted snow and rain water for home plants and worms. The curious thing in winter snow is its "dryness". The dead leafs left in an outdoor compost heap become extremely dry because of sublimation and they are a very good bedding for worms.

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My family produces at least 3 pounds (1.2 kg) of compostable waist weekly.
(I don't count cleenexes and paper towels since I rarely put them
in compost.)
All this goes directly to the 6 tray worm bin mentioned before.
Worms seem to be happy of such an amount.
One tray can hold 2 loads like this including additional bedding material, I add with each load.
This makes 2 weeks per tray. So the last tray will come to the bottom
in 6*2 = 12 weeks.
Actually 8 weeks would be enough for a finished compost, so for minimal
needs I would be satisfied with 4 trays.
I keep the additional two to get better processed compost and "just in case".

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From December 2007 FedEx started to brake my bins.
4 bins came broken and one was lost by them.
For a good side I have to mention that all the items were refunded.
(By FedEx and of course by me)

Now I have changed the currier to Canada Post/USPS.
This was working well, but here is a bad surprise...

All the bins are packed in a hard cardboard boxes and padded with an additional layer of cardboard and wood pieces.

Now I switch to a larger box to have more space for padding.
I hope this will not happen again.

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This is a picture after the move of my bin from the backyard to basement,
from November 2007.

Now it grew to a 6 - tray system and is capable to process all the compatible food scraps from our family.
Here I signed all the usual components I use for worm composting:
Dead leafs, sand, cardboard, peat moss and melted snow or rain water.
Very rarely I add some amount of soil sweetener.

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