SIUC to be one of first universities to use vermicompostingJaclyn BrenningDaily Egyptian
In a small shed on East Pleasant Hill Road, a picture of a green, smiling worm wearing sunglasses is pasted to a stainless steel bin.
SIUC Physical Plant employee Andilee Warner said she would like to see the worm painted maroon - its natural color is red, after all - to support the University's colors.
"Maybe our logo could be: 'SIUC has worms,'" she said, laughing. "But I don't think that would fly."
But SIU does have worms - about 50,000 of them right now, red and squirming in an eight by five foot bin, and Warner said they are waiting for the arrival of about two million more in the next couple of weeks. The worms are the result of an idea Warner had about two years ago to help recycle waste at SIUC and reduce the University's reliance on landfills.
It's called vermicomposting, the use of worms to decompose waste. A company called New Horizon Group brought the process up to date with stainless steel units, each of which holds thousands of worms. A layer of garbage is spread over the unit, and the worms, an Argentinean breed of voracious eaters, feed on the organic material, break it down and excrete it to produce a soil richer than most top soils.
SIUC is one of the pioneers in the process of decomposing, and starting this fall, University employees at Lentz and Trueblood dining halls will no longer be trucking food waste to the Jackson County landfill. Instead, the waste, from cardboard and cake to chicken bones and lettuce, will be eaten by the worms. During the next few months of the summer semester, when the dining halls are not in use, the worms will eat compost and shredded paper from various University departments.
Warner said she realized there was a waste problem on campus after numbers showed the three dining halls wasted between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds of food every day. This was just from the meals eaten at the dining halls and did not include waste from cooking preparation or other campus departments.
Warner pointed to the pieces of lettuce and carrots on the surface of the bin.
"These are hungry worms," she said, running a gloved hand through the dirt and scooping up a fistful of wriggling worms. "This is like candy for them."
The worms eat about half of their body weight every day. With about two million worms at work, Warner said they expect the worms to eat about 1,000 pounds of waste a day.
Although the worms will consume waste, they will also produce their own in the form of excretion, better known as worm castings.
Brian Klubek, chair of SIUC's Plant, Soil and Agricultural Systems, said he is excited for the bulk of the worms to arrive. He and his graduate assistants will use the castings harvested from the bottom of the bin for research. Whatever is leftover will be spread as fertilizer supplement on SIUC's property such as fields or patches of land around campus.
The study's results will not be available until next spring, but Klubeck said he is eager to see how the castings help develop certain areas.
The project has cost the University about $145,000, Warner said, although getting the project off its feet cost about $300,000. Everything - including the yellow mobile lifter that will dump waste-filled trashcans into the bins, commercial paper shredders and the worms themselves - has been paid through grants and research funding. The University paid for the building, and that's about it, Warner said.
And the facility's maintenance is low. To heat the building, the University uses recycled motor oil from University fleet cars. To follow the recycling goals, the University used fly ash, a glass-like substance created from burning fuel at SIUC's steam plant, for the building's concrete floors.
Mark Crowson, president of branch of the New Horizon Group, said he expects SIUC to be one of the largest vermicomposting firms in the country.
SIUC will also be one of the first universities to use worms to recycle waste, and Warner said she thinks it is appropriate.
"We're the innovators," she said. "We're the ones that are supposed to think outside the box."
