Between 30 to 40 percent of the United States’ food supply is wasted. Vermicomposting keeps that garbage out of the landfill and turns it back into food.

You probably end up throwing away a lot of food after some meals. It’s okay, most of us wish we were better about food waste but it often seems unavoidable. We live in a society of surplus where many of us have more than enough for over 3 meals a day. Food donations are great but what about those leftover scraps on your plate or the food items that spoil quickly?

Apple cores, banana peels, moldy bread, coffee grounds, tea bags, eggshells, old pasta, strawberry stems, leftover rice, bad broccoli, spoiled cauliflower… all that food waste ends up in the garbage and eventually the landfill where it rots and serves no purpose other than wasting more food. It’s an unfortunate side effect of all our abundance that so much just goes wasted.

But if we look to nature, we find a simple solution that helps solve our food waste problem AND helps us grow better food, faster. Vermicomposting is the natural process of using worms to aid in the composting process. This happens all the time in nature but you can set up a similar small-scale ecosystem right in your house with a worm bin.