The cafeteria waste at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center will eventually be used for the building’s grounds and landscaping.

On July 14, Mattoon’s Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center installed a pulper unit in the cafeteria’s tray line where all the food could be dumped, except for bones and Styrophoam. The pulper then squeezes out the food, making a juice pulped food. From there, the food is dispensed into a ten-gallon bucket and is fed to red wiggler worms in worm bins.

“The worms can eat half their weight in food each day, they’ll digest the food and make castings out of it, which is the richest nutrient on earth,” said Jeff Nichols, manager of custodial services at Sarah Bush Lincoln. “We’ll harvest the castings, use it on the grounds, in the landscaping, like in the shrubs and that.”

The castings are put into a mesh-lined water container, and then with an aerator, the once leftover cafeteria food will be able to be used on the grounds. According to Nichols, it makes the grass extremely healthy and is sort of a worm tea.

By August, the vermicomposting process will come full circle to the health center as the pulped food will be set to be fed to the worms in an outside storage building. The new idea came as a result of what to do with the some 400 pounds of food waste that is dispensed on average every day at Sarah Bush.

“It’s the right thing to do I think,” said Nichols. “The president and the administration team here thinks outside of the box, looks for alternatives. So I think it’s a wonderful idea, and in the long run, I think it will be saving Sarah Bush dollars. It may be able to reduce the amount of trash pick-up.”

Even though the new process has been added to the recycling program, Sarah Bush is still involved in recycling everything from wood pallets to fax machines. In fact, Nichols mentioned an unofficial total of 26 items that the hospital recycles and has said that they are building on that.

“The surgical tools that we’re no longer allowed to reuse, we donate to medical missions in third world countries,” said Nichols. “They’re able to reuse those and they appreciate that.”

Bob Sarkar, the regional director for food and nutrition services at both the Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana and Danville has said that they do not have a vermicomposting program, but do have a program similar to Sarah Bush’s reuse of surgical tools.

“Whatever leftover food we have goes to community needs,” Sarkar said of the Catholic Medical Center. “We donate it to a crisis nursery, where kids have been abandoned, and then we bring the food up to the right temperature and give it to the nursery.”