By David Jonathan Epstein
In and around a nondescript two-story redbrick building in East River Park resides a community of thousands who are writhing and wriggling all over one another, literally sustaining themselves on garbage. They live out their dirt-covered lives in this building, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge.
“They like it in the dark,” said Christina Datz-Romero, 43, director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center, of the scads of composting worms that she oversees here. Datz-Romero is about 5’9” with a lean, muscular build that shows through her sleeveless shirt. Her hair is short, easy to maintain, except in the back where a single dreadlock is coiled like a snake, showing a blonde streak, perhaps the sun-soaked scar of someone constantly looking down to earth. She has been dubbed the “Worm Lady,” “Compost Queen” and, her personal favorite, the “Compost Goddess,” and this redbrick building, a former fireboat house, is her castle, and her worms her minions.
The trappings of a compost queen are many and varied. Accordingly, Datz-Romero’s office overlooking the East River is a vision of an environmentalist’s attic. Her compulsions begin more projects than can possibly be finished, and she has the junk to prove it.
On one end are boxes, buckets and binders bearing labels that likely appear sparingly in other New York offices: “Arthropods: crustaceans (pill bugs!!);” “Waste Free NYC;” “Worm Brochures;” and, like any office, there are cell phones, but here they are in an extra-special box: “Cell Phone Recycling.”
The fleshy green tentacles of aloe plants wind tortuously along some of the window sills, and, from one corner, a five-ft.-tall fern gives one the feel of a spy looking through the brush at the boats passing beneath the bridge.
Outside, next to the building are a series of bins, each holding about 1,000 pounds of refuse. Last year, these bins processed 60 tons of garbage and emerged with 15 tons of a soil so rich and fertile it is known as “black gold” among farmers and botany enthusiasts.
The ultimate goal of composting is to reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills, and thus the amount of tax money that is spent getting it there. The black gold byproduct, a fertilizer that is as effective and more eco-friendly than synthetics, is simply a pleasant consequence.
The closing of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, formerly the world’s largest dump, made alternative disposal methods timelier than ever. The Sanitation Department’s budget, meanwhile, has skyrocketed toward $1 billion.
The bins are a mix of organic waste: newspaper, eggshells, fruit peels, sawdust, leaves, kitchen scraps and, of course, worms. Normal composting does not require worms, only other microorganisms that digest refuse. But these special “compost worms,” able to consume their bodyweight in garbage each day, vastly speed up the process and produce the pot of black gold at the end.
In 1990 on a hiking trip in Harriman State Park Datz-Romero’s path first crossed with her worms. On the trip Upstate, she commandeered several neglected bags of leaves that sat in the park. Her unlikely eureka moment came soon thereafter, when Cornell Cooperative Extension composting expert John Ameroso came to the ecology center’s main building at 215 E. Seventh St. to do a workshop. It was there that Ameroso told Datz-Romero to order special composting worms from California.
When the box of special worms arrived, she took a peek inside. “I open the box, and I said, ‘I’ve got these worms in the bags from Harriman.’ I just didn’t know the kind I had were these composting worms.”
Still, the first shipment of 300 pounds of composting worms, scientific name: Eisena foetida, at about $7 per pound, went awry because Datz-Romero did not yet know how to care for the worms. Many of them were scorched by the sun. “We should have started with 50 pounds,” she joked in retrospect.
The ecology center sells about 10 tons out of the 15 tons per year of compost the worms produce; the rest is used in and around local parks and gardens, including at the Lower East Side Ecology Center Garden on E. Seventh St. and in East River Park. However, the revenue from soil sales only covers about 20 percent of the budget that the composting project requires, and new resources are hard to come by.
The center’s composting “would never sustain itself,” Datz-Romero admitted, noting that the neighborhood’s overall loss of garden space has had an impact. “When we first started I thought it could, but it takes a lot of labor and the economics of scale just are not there to be self-sustaining.”Indeed, Datz-Romero, with a permanent staff of only herself and a handful of workers, has been known to work six-day weeks and 12-hour days just to be able to collect and organize refuse, a schedule that, while it leaves time for worms, has not allowed her time for children.
She expects that a big price hike, which began Sept. 15, in what restaurants will have to pay landfill carters to take away their organic waste, will cause increased interest in composting. “Now we have the economic argument to add to the environmental argument,” Datz-Romero said in reference to the new incentive to compost. She noted that it could take months or more after the price increase to see if more restaurants opt for composting.
The Empire State Development Corporation recently gave the ecology center a grant to do a study that would determine if the composting project could be enlarged enough to become a viable business. Economic sustainability would require an increase in the amount of material processed from about 1,000 pounds per day to 50 tons per day, or about 100 times what the center does now. But if ever there was a time to make the increase, it’s now, Datz-Romero feels.
“The closing of [Fresh Kills landfill] without a plan of what to do, that should not be allowed. We can’t just develop sports [in the park], it isn’t all fun and games, we need to do something with garbage,” Datz-Romero said. She continued on to muse about her native Germany and how they recently banned aluminum cans because they can only be used once before being crushed and recycled. But even as she spoke, her mind wandered to the day’s work and the projects ahead. Such is the life of a compost goddess.
