Seventh Generation Bottles as Worm Food?

I received an interesting email from RWC reader, Mark Stephenson, a short time ago, explaining how he was feeding the outer shell of Seventh Generation laundry detergent bottles to his worms. This certainly piqued my curiosity, so I asked if Mark could send in some photos. Here is a blurb from Mark’s original email, along with some of the cool photos he sent in:

We are users of Seventh Generation products and their latest packaging for laundry detergent is *worm friendly*. The outer shell is recycled fiber that I shred for my worm bins. The rest is goes into our normal recycle stream (cap to Preserve http://www.preserveproducts.com , inner plastic liner to the curbside recycle program).

That looks like a really cool bottle to me!

Thanks again, Mark, for sharing this with me and the rest of the RWC community!

Written by Bentley on December 21st, 2011 with 5 comments.
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5 comments

Read the comments left by other users below, or:

Daniel Herrington
#1. December 21st, 2011, at 11:13 AM.

Question. Is this Seveth Gen. biodegradable? That would explain a lot in terms of effectiveness as the biodegradable material would not contain anything that would offset, or damage the worms life cycle. Just curious.

Daniel Herrington
#2. December 21st, 2011, at 11:17 AM.

disregard my last comment I found my answer on their website. http://www.seventhgeneration.com/4X-Laundry-Detergent and of course it is biodegradable….

Happy Holidays all

thuan
#3. December 21st, 2011, at 1:07 PM.

I wish all packaging is this “smart”. Sometimes products are no package this way. I hope we all try to recycle as much as we can!

On another note. I recently started using biodegradable baby diaper, Grovia. I put the pee diaper into the green compostable recycling and the poo diaper into the trash. But I was thinking, if I hot compost the pee diaper for 6 months then vermicompost it, would that work? Has any in the vermicompost community try anything like this with compostable diapers?

John Duffy
#4. December 21st, 2011, at 9:40 PM.

If the diapers are biodegradable, I wouldn’t see any reason why you couldn’t hot compost them. I guess you’d have to give it a try and see how well it works…If all diapers were biodegradable, that would be a huge burden off of the landfills

Bentley
#5. December 22nd, 2011, at 10:07 AM.

I would absolutely compost these – and in fact, would set up a specific outdoor bin for ALL of them (not just “pee diapers”), as I have done in the past with compostable cat litter. You should mix them with some carbon-rich bedding materials (shredded cardboard, straw, fall leaves etc etc etc), but other than that it’s just a matter of keeping the system protected from the elements, and well away from “regular” composting systems, gardens, waterways etc.
Just my 2 cents

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