New Eco-Friendly Packaging Triggers Boom In Guilt-Free Littering

An interesting Painting

Came across an interesting lttle box in a side street in Palo Alto, CA, which I wanted to share here. I like the design of course, but I could not figure out the purpose of the box.

Can O Worm - fun for the whole family

Keeping wriggly pets is indeed a lot of fun for the whole family. There's always something going on in the Can O Worms worm box and it is quite astonishing how much kitchen garbage these friendly helpers devour every day.

Perhaps you, too, would like to recycle your kitchen waste into wonderful vermicompost?

Find out more about the Can O Worms on my homepage

http://www.topsoiljapan.com

Let's cure the bubonic plague with malaria!

We at Neighborhood Worm Farm are committed to act responsibly and think about how we can recycle valuable resources or reduce energy consumption.

Therefore we advocate reducing waste in the household. To us it makes sense to recycle any waste on the spot, right where it is produced, to eliminate further transportation or handling elsewhere. We believe keeping worms are ideal to deal with kitchen garbage. They are easy to handle, 100% biologic and instead of consuming energy, they supply you with the best fertilizer nature has to offer.

Now here is industry's answer to reducing garbage: Companies like National Panasonic and Hitachi came up with a brilliant gadget that purportedly transfers kitchen garbage into compost within hours. It almost looks like a rice cooker, only bigger, and has a chamber which receives the kitchen garbage. You can dump up to 700 g of organic waste at a time. Close the lid, push a button, and magic will run its course. 105 minutes and 1.75 KWh later you will find all garbage reduced to 1/7 of its original volume, burned down to a miserable little, almost odorless pile. Let's feel good about it! We've reduced 700 grams of garbage to 100 grams, saving 600 g space in the municipal landfill. And it does not smell as bad as garbage.

But at what cost?

Not only did we fork out 70,000 Yen [ USD 583] for the equipment (subsidized by cities for up to 20,000 yen!! [USD 166]), we've also consumed 1.75 KWh electricity in half an afternoon. To produce this amount of electricity, approximately 1 kg CO2 was added to the atmosphere - negligible, you might think, until you multiply this amount by a million households [only 1 in 40] and 365 days per year: Collectively, that reduction in kitchen waste a la Hitachi burdened the environment with an additional 251,038.40 tons of CO2, not counting the energy needed to produce and distribute the million so called home-composters.

Can you really cure the bubonic plague with malaria?


To add a little more insult, NEC markets its home-composters under the "ECO" predicate; a cute leafy logo that assures the house wife everything is well thought out and ecologically sound.

We certainly disagree.

Shipment of Can O Worms arrived in Kobe

Received my 1st shipment of COWs from Australia to satisfy growing demand for worm boxes in Japan.


Eva is having fun helping!

Feeding your worms

You could do what I did for the longest time and bury your kitchen garbage as is in the bedding. Over time, the worms will gobble it all up and nothing but sweet smelling soil will be left. But given the fact that our wriggly friends do not possess any teeth, a burried banana peel will remain for quite a while in your bin, as the worm depends on a myriad of micro organisms to break down its food for him.

So I decided to aid my recycling workers by turning our kitchen waste into a nice shake for them. For this purpose I use a regular kitchen blender, which I purchased cheaply at a nearby home center. (My wife did not allow me to use our kitchen blender we use for cooking.) I throw in all garbage including apple, banana, vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, tea leaves, egg shells, rice, bread, etc. (no bones, meat, crab shells or fish, though) and add a little water to produce a thick, soupy shake. This I pour onto the surface of the worm bin, making sure I don't cover the whole area. You can never be sure that your cocktail does not contain a substance your worms don't like or might actually be toxic to them! They need a place to escape to. Then I cover all up with wet newsprint or a burlap bag and my pets happily chomp away at their feed. As a matter of fact, it's quite astonishing how much they can devour: since I've started this feeding system, I think through-put capacity has tripled!

Al Gore pleads for environment before U.S. Congress

The appearance of the Oscar- winning, Nobel-nominated Tennesseean stirred extraordinary interest. It was broadcast live by cable news channels, and long lines of people waited for hours to claim the seats available to the public.

Gore delivered the same message to a joint meeting of two House subcommittees dealing with energy, science and technology in the morning, and to a hearing of the Senate environment committee in the afternoon: Humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, and meaningful global action to cut emissions linked to warming will happen only if the United States takes decisive action.


This is taken from an article in the IHT on March 22, 2007.
I post it here because I think Al Core's contribution to the environmental cause is so enormous not because he's such a conservationist, but because of his contacts to the highest levels of decision makers.