WSU Extension addresses food waste with new Worm Chalet

A cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind new food waste prevention facility will be unveiled at the Washington State University Skagit County Extension Office next Wednesday, Sept. 25.

It’s a Worm Chalet – the brain child of Extension staff committed to preventing food waste.

In 2023, staff offered programs and a social media campaign, “Use Food Well,” to begin helping Skagit county residents learn how to keep food waste out of landfills.

But this year, as they prepped another season of food waste prevention activities, Diane Smith of the Extension’s Family and Consumer Science unit and her colleagues took a close look at their own practices.

“We looked at the trash can in our office kitchen used for staff lunches and food demonstrations,” she said. “It was filling up with food. We weren’t walking what we talk.”

A small cross-unit team began to look for ways to change office practices. Its first step was signing up for Ridwell, a service that processes plastic, Styrofoam and other hard-to-dispose trash from packages delivered to the office. (Yes, it picks up in La Conner.)

Tackling food waste was the task of Alex DuPont, coordinator of the county Master Gardener program, which has an extensive composting system and a worm bin at its Memorial Highway demonstration garden. She turned to a trio of Master Gardeners who design and build structures at the garden.

Master Gardener Herta Kurp sketched out a design for a worm bin enclosure. Once it was approved by the Extension’s landlord, The Port of Skagit, she and fellow gardeners Claire Cotnoir and Hank Davies got to work.

“While we were building it, people were constantly coming up and asking what we were doing,” said Kurp. “Someone came up with the name ‘Worm Chalet’ because it’s kind of fancy.”

The worm bin inside the Chalet is not fancy at all, but a comfortable home for red wriggler worms that digest scraps from the new kitchen food bin. (Paper towels, paper plates and napkins, meat, onion peels and other food scraps not suitable for worms go into a separate green bin.) Weekly, staff members weigh the food bin to see how much they are diverting from the waste stream. About 12 pounds was collected in the first six weeks.

That’s a small drop in an enormous bucket. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 30 to 40 percent of the food supply is wasted – and food is the single largest category of material placed in landfills.

Overall, about a third of the world’s food supply is thrown away, mostly by consumers.

That’s terrible for family budgets, says Smith, whose mother’s family “ate every bit of the pig except the squeal during the Depression.”

And it’s a terrible use of food and the land that produces it. “The highest purpose of food is to enjoy it and to be nourished, not waste it and throw it away,” she said. “Someone creates beautiful soil to make strawberries that are sweet, red and delicious and when you buy them, push them to the back of the refrigerator, have no plan for using them and then toss them, everything along the way is wasted!”

It’s also terrible for the climate. The USDA says that production, transportation and handling of food generate significant carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and that food in landfills generates methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas.

Smith thinks the Worm Chalet is an excellent demonstration of the Extension’s new food waste slogan “Plan, prepare and practice.”

“I think ‘practice’ says ‘I want to think and behave differently around how I deal with food,’” she says.

Smith and her staff focus on “plan and prepare” by offering classes on efficient food shopping, meal planning and using everything up.

Once bones have become soup, carrot tops have been turned into pesto and banana peels are vegan banana bacon (Smith can teach you how), the Master Gardeners and Master Composter Recyclers and their worms tackle the backend practice of keeping food scraps out of the waste stream.

For people in multiunit buildings, that can be a challenge. WSU has given out tabletop compost containers, but apartment dwellers have no place to process food waste once their containers are full. Smith hopes the new Worm Chalet will be a first step toward providing access to food recycling programs. A community compost site may also be an answer.

The new Worm Chalet will be dedicated during Climate Week and just four days before the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. The 2 p.m. Sept. 25 ribbon-cutting ceremony takes place at 11768 Westar Lane, Suite A.