At Middlebeck, sustainability is more than a goal—it’s a shared responsibility. In collaboration with The Urban Worm, a local community interest company, we’ve introduced a double-barrel worm farm system at the popular Gannets Café. Installed in August, this innovative system is now fully operational, processing the majority of the café’s daily food waste while engaging the local community in sustainable living.
The double-barrel system, with a combined 400-litre capacity and seeded with 4kg of hungry tiger worms, efficiently handles 2–3kg of food waste daily. This translates to approximately 1 tonne of food waste per year, producing up to 100kg of nutrient-balanced compost. Local residents will be further engaged through an exciting community planting event and DIY workshop, once it’s time to harvest the first soil produced by the worms.
To make the initiative educational and visually engaging, the site features information boards equipped with QR codes. These provide easy access to additional resources on worm farming, encouraging café customers and passers-by to explore the process and consider implementing it at home. The café staff have been trained to manage the system and sort food waste correctly, and the simplicity of care required has already inspired early interest from visitors keen to become home-based ‘worm caretakers.’ This lowmaintenance system not only reduces waste but also fosters community involvement.
We’re proud to see Middlebeck’s ‘worm palace’ thriving and are delighted to offer a practical, sustainable initiative that builds community cohesion and sets an example for ecologically sustainable future.
Worms are more powerful than the African Elephant and are more important to the economy than the cow.
Charles Darwin
We’re thrilled with Middlebeck’s new ‘worm palace’, and we’re delighted to have offered residents a novel solution for living sustainably which promotes community cohesion and collective direct action for an ecologically sustainable future.
Simon Murphy, Community Development Lead