Worms, our waste warriors

Sharing lunch with students at the Santa Monica College cafeteria one recent afternoon are a couple hundred thousand lowlife diners that most folks would only be caught dead with. Inside a giant, hydraulically operated bin behind the kitchen, 800,000 red wiggler worms are chowing down, as they do 24 hours a day here and at an increasing number of homes and eco-leaning facilities in Los Angeles. It's part of a makeover as dramatic as anything since a mouse got named Mickey.

Over the course of the year these waste warriors will consume 3 1/2 tons of food scraps -- watermelon rinds, egg shells, spoiled lettuce -- that would have gone to landfills and fueled methane and greenhouse gas emissions.

"They're excellent employees. They just do their job -- eat and mate," says Madeline Brodie, recycling coordinator at the college. They also produce droppings, or castings, that make a primo organic fertilizer, which is used around the campus.

Reaching a gloved hand into what looks like placid soil but is actually a mix of worm droppings and shredded food and cardboard, Brodie scoops up an explosion of wigglers. "They're not solitary like earthworms," she says, grinning, referring to the larger night crawlers most of us have in our yards. "They like working together."

After eons of doing the planet's dirty work, a critter slagged as slime and vermin on a good day is finding a place in the hearts of green fans as a composting superhero. Nature's built-in recycling program, composting breaks down organic waste through controlled decomposition -- rot, a process worms accelerate through tireless munching and excreting. Once seen as a realm of DIY dead-enders, composting is becoming cool as landfills run out of space.

"I'll be at a Hollywood party and all of a sudden we'll get into a riff on composting," says Douglas E. Welch, a computer consultant and backyard composter in Van Nuys who has a blog called A Gardener's Notebook.

"It's not just the hippie fringe like 20 years ago. Now it's mom and dad public," says Keith Thomsen, program manager for L.A. County's Smart Gardening initiative that offers composting workshops. "Composting gives people a chance to participate in an immediate solution. You're the recycler."