Faced with imminent landfill taxes of £10 a tonne, Huddersfield Council have hired thousands of worms at the Huddersfield Community and Heritage Farm to eat their way through 120 tonnes of industrial cardboard packaging a year.

Everyone wins in this 12-month pilot study. The shredded cardboard mixed with manure is the worm equivalent of a Michelin-starred meal, the output is one of the best nitrogen-free fertilisers available, and the Council use up less costly landfill.

Effective Micro-organisms (EM) is the name given by Dr Teruo Higa to the liquid concoction of 15 strains of naturally-occurring beneficial bacteria he has developed. Popular with Japanese organic farmers, it can be used as a composter, a dietary supplement and a household cleaner.

Composting
Rather than decomposing organic waste through oxidation (a smelly, putrefying process requiring months of constant attendance aerating the compost heap), EM uses fermentation. No toxic waste or offensive smell is produced. Harmful bacteria and fungi are excluded. Kitchen or farm organic waste can be transformed into nutrient-rich compost in four weeks.

If the ease of using EM can encourage households to compost rather than throw away their organic waste, it will significantly reduce pressure on landfill sites. If EM compost were used extensively in farming, it could replace much of the 2.6 million tonnes of environmentally-damaging, synthetic fertilisers sprayed onto the Earth's soil each year.

EM-produced compost has antioxidant properties. It kills toxins in the soil as well as protecting plants against root tissue damage, just as vitamins A,C and E protect humans from free radical damage. Instead of expending their energy on self-defence, plants can spend it on producing tasty, high quality grains, vegetables or fruit which retain their freshness longer than chemically-grown crops. (These contain lower oxygen and higher free radical and toxin levels).

Other benefits for plants include: higher nutrient levels in the soil, greater resistance to pests, diseases, adverse weather and flooding, enhanced photosynthetic and protein-developing capacity, better soil penetration by the roots, and, over time, increased yields. Field trials completed include maize, lettuce, onion, rice, papaya (a pear-shaped fruit from Hawaii and Mexico), herbage grasses, vegetables and apples.

EM can also be used to make compost toilets and septic tanks more efficient. Human waste is turned into a soil that is antioxidising and rich in beneficial micro-organisms. All EM composting applications are safe to handle and be near to because its beneficial microbes competitively exclude disease-forming microbes.

Dietary supplement
EM has been combined with rice, seaweeds and papaya to make a dietary supplement. Like other livings foods such as miso, kombucha and amazaki, it renews enzymes in the body and provides antioxidants.

Household cleaner
EM can be poured down the sink or toilet as a strong alternative to chemical antibacterial products. Three practical examples ...

• In 2002 the Coach House Trust community project in Glasgow prepared two vegetable plots, and enriched the soil of one with EM compost, the other with conventional fertiliser. Planting took place four weeks later and the produce was compared in late Summer. The EM plot produced double the yield of the conventional bed and the taste was far superior. (In Japan, vegetable markets offer both organic and EM-organic crops. The EM crops cost a little more.)

• St. Christopher School in Letchworth is now EM-composting all of the food waste from its canteen

• The East London Community Recycling Project is working with the residents of the Nightingale Estate in Hackney (London) to compost the food waste from 600 households. EM is used to prevent putrefaction before the compost goes into a vessel composter

For more information contact Living Soil Regenerative Design Systems on Tel.: 01556 650116 www.livingsoil.co.uk

See also Store organic waste outside

The UK now bins (2005) 33% of all the food grown for human consumption, up from 28% in the mid-nineties. The US now bins 40-50%. Ignorance, laziness, over-production and over-purchasing were blamed. To give an idea how immoral all this is, the value of just the UK household food waste alone, £22 billion, is the amount needed to prevent 150 million Africans suffering from starvation.

Domestic food waste
New EU regulations mean that it will be illegal to put food waste into landfill sites from January 1st 2006. Not only does its sheer bulk quickly eat up Europe's fast-diminishing landfills, the 3.4 million tons of rotting food also cost a fortune to process and emit methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. Accordingly, local councils will soon be adding domestic food waste recycling bins to the current bins for recycling packaging and glass.

Industrial food waste
The supermarket food system, and the consumer expectations it has encouraged, are the major problems. Whole consignments of crops are wasted because they do not meet unnecessarily high supermarket quality and presentation standards. Large amounts of food are ditched because they have reached (Ed.- what are often highly over-precautionary) sell by dates. More food may be thrown away simply because it is surplus to requirements. To repent, many supermarkets have now joined the Fare Share scheme, whereby food manufacturers and sellers give waste food to the 250 charities which feed the four million people in the UK who cannot afford to buy enough to eat.
Other solutions include:

• using worms to convert kitchen and garden waste by anaerobic digestion into fertiliser and a bio-gas, as Greenfinch Ltd of Ludlow plan to do. A successful pilot project with Sainsbury's has shown that this technique can even be used if the food is still in its packaging. The gas is used for heating and to generate electricity

• processing waste food to generate heat and electricity, as practised by the bakery chain Greggs, based in Trefforest, Wales. Food, both in and out of packaging, is dried into a powder. The powder is converted into a gas that can then be burnt to provide heat and electricity

• composting at home. If you are not using a rat/fox-proof bin, you can compost everything except for cooked foods and raw meat and fish. If you rat/fox-proof your bin, by digging a hole for the bin and lining the bottom of the hole with fine chicken netting, you can compost everything, (including paper and cardboard).The laws that do not allow catering waste to contain meat (in case livestock or wild birds come into contact with it) do not apply

Composting indoors
If you live in a flat, or a terrace with only a yard, the rotting and odour-free composting solution is Bokashi. This system breaks down all food waste, making it safe to put in any type of compost bin, including those that sit on concrete. You simply put all your raw, cooked, processed food waste plus meat, fish and dairy into a sealed bucket, then sprinkle them with the Bokashi micro-organisms which completely stop any smell.

Ed.- Our thanks to Keely Mellor of York Rotters for providing the information on composting.