who we are: current operations

Current operations:
Bay Worms (BW) began as Berkeley Worms ‘died’ of natural causes. Before that, Berkeley Worms became an independent entity in 1994 when UC Berkeley took over the operations of the Recycling Collective. Berkeley Worms was begun with seed funds from the East Bay Community Foundation and Alameda County Waste Management Authority (ACWMA), and has continued to sustain itself and expand with support from ACWMA, the ASUC, collection fees, and sales of castings. Bay Worms is (as Berkeley Worms was) a non-profit, student/ citizens-run collective operating as an independent entity, and is dedicated to furthering sustainable living through composting. For more detail about our internal structure, see who we are & how we're organized.

We work to divert waste from the landfills in two ways: composting of student's food waste, and educating the campus and surrounding community about composting.

Composting practice:
Bay Worms currently collects food waste from the businesses and residences in Alameda and Berkeley. This brings in an average of 500 pounds of mixed food waste per week during the school year.

We employ a relatively low-tech, and labor intensive (at the moment) method of composting (for more details & photos, see our methods page). The food waste is collected on-site in wheeled bins. We compost the food waste in worm bins, in thermophilic windrow piles. We built the worms bins with our own continuous-flow design. Continuous flow eliminates the difficulties of harvesting castings.

Worm castings is a very high-quality compost which we bag and sell. We sell our worm castings in 1 cu. ft. bags (26 lbs.), 10 lbs and 20 lbs as well as a mixture of high quality compost and castings via phone orders. Some quantities of the thermophilic compost are donated to nonprofits, community gardens, and school gardens. Some of the groups that have recently been given donations include:

· National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD) http://www.niadart.org/index.htm

· Conservation and Resource Studies student garden, located at Walnut St. and Virginia Ave., Berkeley)

· People’s Park community garden, located half a block east of Telegraph Ave. between Haste St. and Dwight Way, Berkeley

· Hayward School District Nutritional Learning Community Project http://www.husd.k12.ca.us/Nutrition/NutritionProj.htm

Our composting site is located at the Richmond Field Station (RFS), a University-owned research station on the edge of the bay in Richmond (see here for pictures). We are grateful for our good relationship with them that has allowed us to continue composting there at no cost. Due to ongoing remediation projects at the RFS we will be moving to the other side of the RFS in the summer of 2005. We look forward to this move as an opportunity to remake our composting facility into a more attractive demonstration site, with East-Bay-native plants and integrated garden.

Education and Outreach:
We cannot collect everyone's food waste, but we try to give everyone the tools necessary to compost for themselves. We also educate people about the workings of a worker-run non-profit. Our target communities fall into three groups: UC Berkeley students, employees, and institutions; the Berkeley community at large; and the Berkeley Worms collective itself.

Our main efforts at composting education are focused on UC Berkeley students. Each week we set up a table on Sproul Plaza where we distribute literature (our own and others, in various languages), familiarize people with ACWMA's composting program, and direct people to any other good composting resources we come across. We also give presentations on composting and/or running a non-profit collective to UC Berkeley classes, and attend on- and off-campus forums on waste reduction. We perhaps have the greatest influence on the students in the cooperative houses of the USCA, who use our collection bins in their kitchens. Many of these students have never heard of composting, and most learn to make it part of their everyday lives. Our contacts with the employees and institutions of UC Berkeley come about through our contracts with the dining halls and campus restaurants. We maintain a dialogue (in english and spanish) with the employees about our composting operation, and are working with the dining hall managers to increase the percentage of waste we divert.

We extend out into the surrounding community through our table at the Saturday Berkeley Farmer's Market and by establishing contacts with schools, where we give presentations about worm composting and its connections to the many aspects of sustainable living.

The members of the Berkeley Worms collective are the ones who learn the most. Each year 8-12 students and recent graduates of UC Berkeley or other local schools learn first hand how to run a non-profit, work in a collective, and maintain high-volume composting systems. Aside from developing a life-long commitment to organics recycling and an understanding of our food cycle, students gain business, self-management, and problem-solving skills.