Hotel’s guests include army of helpful worms

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Every hotel has its hidden back door where the tinkle of piano music and clinking champagne glasses give way to the roar of air conditioners and refrigeration units.

In back of South Africa’s oldest and grandest hotel, the Mount Nelson, the scent of cleaning fluid flirts with trash-bin odors. Hopeful pigeons forage, and the humble cars of hotel staffers line up like patient donkeys.

And then there are the worms: something like 1 million of them, according to resident worm farmer Shaun Gibbons.

This army of invertebrates munches through mountains of the hotel’s organic waste, reducing it to fertilizer and compost for the hotel’s nine acres of luxuriant gardens. In the process, the worms are cutting Mount Nelson’s contribution to landfills and to the greenhouse gases produced by decaying waste.

Gibbons gingerly dipped his fingers into a crate of worms in the hotel’s worm farm, clucking sympathetically – the poor things don’t like publicity. They loathe being hauled into the light to be examined and photographed.

Pineapple peels, tomatoes, mango skins, lettuce and potatoes all find their way into the hotel’s chilled trash-sorting rooms, where they make great food for the worms, which consume their own weight daily. The end product, so to speak, is vermicast, a compost-like substance rich in nitrogen and potassium.

The worms multiply rapidly, leaving small cocoons in the soil, each producing several more worms. Two worms can multiply to 1 million in a year.

The pilot project was started early this year, and one-third of the hotel’s organic waste already goes to the worms, saving a lot of money in disposal fees and fertilizers.

The hotel aims to process about 70 percent of its organic waste by next year.

“The hotel industry produces a lot of food waste,” said Gibbons, taking the lid off one worm crate and prodding the soil. “We’re trying to deal with our problem and not pass it along to the next person. We’re trying to do our little bit for nature.

“The more people who get involved in this, the better it will be for the whole world. It eliminates a substance, methane gas, which is damaging to the environment. It’s helping the ozone.”

Previously, the organic waste was taken to pig farms, which eliminated the need for the landfill but did little about greenhouse gas production.

The worm idea was the brainchild of hotel technical services manager Rob Fiander as a way to cut costs and reduce the hotel’s environmental harm.

At first, he kept the worms a secret from management because he feared failure and knew of no other similar hotel project.

“It’s inspired a lot of people in the hotel, a lot of the staff,” said Nick Seewer, managing director of the upscale Orient-Express Africa trains and hotels group. “It’s funny how people react, even at the most junior level, to trying to better the environment.”

He said some other South African hotels have expressed interest in the project and the hotel has received many calls from Cape Town residents wanting to start home worm farms.