Customers aren’t the only ones enjoying a meal at Bittercreek Alehouse in downtown Boise. Below the restaurant, through a maze of long hallways, past the prep kitchen is a room full of thousands of worms busily munching through pounds of rotting food. The invertebrates are part of a program, called Urban Worm, started by restaurant owner Dave Krick to help dispose of food waste from three of his restaurants on 8th Street.
Started in 2006, Urban Worm was born out of Krick’s frustration with the piles of vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and other organic matter going into the landfills from his businesses. Table scraps cannot be fed to the worms because it includes animal fats. But by using this method, Krick can divert up to hundreds of pounds a day of organic waste from the landfill.
“I was really struggling with the restaurant industry because of how wasteful it was,” Krick said, surveying his two worm bins. “My wife’s a pretty big influence on me and I don’t think we could have stayed in this business in her mind because it’s so wasteful and it frustrated her. We decided if we were going to do it, we needed to do it in a way that was more thoughtful and wasted less.”
It starts in the prep kitchen. His employees working at Bittercreek Alehouse, Red Feather Lounge and Diablo Sons collect organic matter eligible for Urban Worm into bins and every couple of days they feed it through a processing machine. It chops up the waste and squeezes the water out of the food scraps to make it easier for the worms to digest.
From there, it goes into the worm bins every other day. The large bins are filled with worms, food scraps, spent grains from local breweries and topped with shredded newspaper and discarded wood from the oven at Diablo and Sons. There they eat through the material and discard the material in casings, which creates compost material.