worms worms worms

Amid quite a bit of fan-fare and no little amount of paper shuffling, the compost worms arrived about 3 weeks ago to begin their job of munching their way through vast quantities of organic waste, and reproducing ad infinitum....hopefully. This project would have been in no way possible without efforts on both the Australian side and the Egyptian end, particularly the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation. Contrary to the popular opinion that working with government results in going nowhere fast, the clearance papers were drummed up in less than 2 days, when the Australian Quarantine people requested more than my verbal declaration that "it was all organised in Egypt, no problem" to export the worms, and in less than 2 days of arrival the worms had cleared Egyptian quarantine, albeit with over one hundred signatures accompanying their release!

It might however, have been better, if the worms had not made it quite so quickly out of quarantine....The first evening the worm bed was attacked by a pack of dogs, so on arrival in the morning there were large quantities of dried out worms dispersed dead or dying in the pit that had been constructed. We rescued the remaining worms and built them the equivalent of a brick barbecue about a metre high, 1 wide and about 2 metres long, covered during daylight hours with recycled white foam trays, and during the evening with an old cast-iron piece of fencing that needed four people to shift.

The iron grid proved sufficient to keep the dogs at bay, however meant that at least 4 people had to be about every morning to check on the worms. So after a week of heaving iron, an less heavy 2-person dark green cover was located. Very good in theory, until the day that nobody checked on the worms and the temperatures hit 35 degrees. As luck would have it, I had also put in a sprinkling of lovely new rabbit droppings the night before. The ammonia sky-rocketed, the worms dived, and the top surface layers of the bed were hot enough to cook an egg.....needless to say that meant a few more worms expired. A lesson in the dynamics of solar energy!

Happily, yesterday we achieved our first bed separation - the worm numbers have outgrown their original bed so we created three new beds and 3 breeding beds. The only problem is the breeding beds are only 10cm high, and tomorrow's temperatures are expected to top 40 degrees! Looks like I won't be staying that long at the Earth Day event....

Earth Day here in Egypt is sponsored by CSA who kindly have agreed to a display of worms and a demonstration on how to green your roof and produce your own food, using recycled material to create a rooftop or balcony garden. Naturally, worm castings and worm tea form the basis for the plants' food.

We have also included some 20 odd tips for how to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover energy from household waste, for visitors to the Earth Day Event to take home and place somewhere prominent in their dwellings.

The EEAA proposal is still just that - a proposal. It seems we need at least two agencies to sit together, and trying to get either to first pick up the phone to make the appointment is easier said than done. So efforts have been directed to helping existing community based waste management efforts, by either locating low cost technology for recycling the nasties such as plastic and cigarette butts, in ways which are environmentally friendly and result in more energy output than input to convert, as well as training in worm husbandry!

We are also to begin making expanded clay from ground brown glass, and bricks from plastic. A bone-grinder is due to arrive in the next few weeks in which to crush these materials. GTZ, the Geman arm of technology transfer, funded a project in Argentina on producing plastic bricks, and have agreed to pass on the technology - hopefully soon. We will start experimenting anyway!

Meetings with larger corporations on how to improve energy efficiency and achieve zero waste have been progressing very well. There is a lot of enthusiasm at the corporate level to go "green" especially if it makes economic sense.

Wadi Environmental Sciences Centre, a non profit organisation which runs hands-on science based experiments to help children better understand environmental impacts, is presenting World Environment Day with the British Council, based around 6 topics including Air, Water, Health under the theme "Kick the Habit". Collaboration has been going well, with lots of ideas for hands-on activities during the day being generated.

What can you do with your left-over plastic bags? Here are some ideas:
1. Iron the bags together between two sheets of paper until about 8 layers thick. When you have about 1 metre square of "material" cut a hole for your head and hey presto, a rain poncho.
2. Cut the grips of the plastic bag and open it out into one piece. Fold over and roll into a long tube. Cut 1cm strips from the tube and tie the ends together. Wrap this "twine" around an old toilet paper roll, and knit or crochet into a place mat, carry bag, even sandals.