Berkeley Worms is a non-profit, worker-run, composting collective. Founded in 1993 with seed funds from the Alameda County Waste Management Authority along with a few environmental foundations, we compost about 200 of tons of food waste each year from UC-Berkeley dining halls, campus cafes, co-ops and other group housing around campus. Four days a week we collect toters full of rotten veggies, coffee grinds, eggshells, banana peels, and old beans [no meat or dairy] in our special grinder truck and process the material at our site in the Richmond Field Station. Our herd of over a million red worms [Eisenia foetida] turn this ground up vegetable matter into one of the best organic fertilizers around: worm castings. We sell castings and compost online [see below] and at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery.



We hope that by expanding our service contracts to collect food waste from more entities and by selling our worm castings, compost and other products, we can at the same time promote home composting and generate a steady income to fund our organics recycling program. By becoming financially self-sustaining, we hope to be a model for small institutions and municipalities, demonstrating a cost-effective method for recycling organic food waste.