Red Worm Composting
Worm Composting Blog | Quick Facts| Getting Started | Raising Worms | BUY WORMS | WORM INN | Videos | Interviews
Contact Us | About Us | Newsletter | HOT TOPICS | References | Sitemap | Business Directory | Site Policies

Large-Scale Vermicomposting in Hong Kong

I just caught this really interesting video on Al’s Bokashi Blog. 80 million worms processing tons of waste ever day! Totally awesome!! We definitely need more operations like this here in North America!

[UPDATE: June, 2008 - Unfortunately, it looks as though this video has been taken down from the Reuters site]

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Share This

Written by Bentley on October 3rd, 2007 with 7 comments.
Read more articles on Large-Scale Vermicomposting.

Related articles

7 comments

Read the comments left by other users below, or:

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Kami
#1. October 13th, 2007, at 3:19 PM.

I am curious. Can you think of a down-side to large-scale vermicomposting? Everything has pros and cons, but I cannot identify the negatives to vermicomposting.

Have you seen the propsed vertical farming? I think vermicomposting would be a good fit with this type of farming. Of course the problems inherent with verticle farming may mean that it will never get off the ground. –pardon the pun.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Bentley
#2. October 13th, 2007, at 4:37 PM.

Great question, Kami!
Large-scale vermicomposting requires a lot more space than ‘hot composting’ typically, and you are dealing with larger organisms (the worms), which will potentially need more care and attention. If the system is not fully climate-controlled, the worm bed can sometimes heat up (from excess microbial activity), potentially harming the worms.

For the most part however, I think large-scale vermicomposting is a fantastic idea.

As for vertical farming – that sounds familiar, but I need to refresh my memory. I personally think vermicomposting fits in well with any sustainable model of agriculture and living in general. (but I’m also a little biased – haha)

B.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Al
#3. October 23rd, 2007, at 1:52 PM.

Bentley,

Thanks for the mention and the link.

Kami,

“Can you think of a down-side to large-scale vermicomposting? Everything has pros and cons, but I cannot identify the negatives to vermicomposting.”

Only one downside, according to one researcher…

http://tinyurl.com/388f96

“Worms produce a significant amount of greenhouse gases. Recent research done by German scientists has found that worms produced a third of nitrous oxide gases when used for composting.”

…but it appears to be a big one.:-)

Still, its better than the alternative.

Al

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Bentley
#4. October 23rd, 2007, at 2:12 PM.

Hey Al!
I totally forgot about that (have actually been meaning to write a blog post on the topic). Thanks for the reminder.

I would be interested to see HOW “significant” the amount of N2O released is (in comparison to major sources of the gas), and would also be very interested to see if other researchers come up with similar findings/conclusions.

B.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Susan
#5. June 20th, 2008, at 8:55 AM.

Bentley – I loved this video and have sent a number of people to your site to see it. Now, however, when I click on your link I get polar bears. I’ve tried to use google to find the video without success. Can you check your link and see if there’s still a way to get to that particular video? Thanks. Susan.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Bentley
#6. June 20th, 2008, at 1:12 PM.

Hi Susan – thanks for letting me know. That is very odd. They still seem to have it on the Reuters site:
http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=66121&newsChannel=lifestyleMolt
but it won’t load there, so they must have removed it for some reason.

That’s really too bad!

B

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Letitia Wong
#7. June 24th, 2008, at 1:24 AM.

It’s a video of polar bears at a zoo…..

Leave your comment...

If you want to leave your comment on this article, simply fill out the next form:




You can use these XHTML tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> .