Worms on campus

A student-led project is changing compost culture at Concordia

NewsHannah Beach — Published September 15, 2025 0 minutes

It’s lunchtime, and a line-up of over one hundred students worms its way through the hallway as students wait to be served by The People’s Potato, a pay-what-you-can vegan lunch program. 

But it's not just humans being fed in this wing of the university. Around the corner at the interim headquarters for the Concordia Greenhouse, a different sort of feast is already underway. Hundreds of red wiggler worms are munching through leftover food scraps from Le Frigo Vert and The People’s Potato, facilitated by students who want to engage with composting on campus. 

ABCompost is a student-led initiative born out of Concordia’s Zero Waste program. It works to reuse waste in a hands-on way and extend this practice to community members who want to learn about vermicomposting, according to ABCompost co-founder Catherine Rokakis. 

“I noticed that there are a lot of gardening initiatives at Concordia, but there aren't a lot of initiatives that actually do hands-on composting on campus,” Rokakis said.

She said once the food scraps have been converted to fertilizer, they are brought to the community gardens on the university’s Loyola campus to fertilize the crops. 

Unlike traditional composting, which relies on microbial activity to break down food waste, vermicomposting uses worms to digest organic material and speed up decomposition.

The university group prefers red wiggler worms over other popular composting worms, such as the European Nightcrawlers, which are known to be aggressive to one another and are sensitive to colder temperatures.  

“[Red wigglers] are very resilient worms,” Rokakis said. “They're really great at adapting.”

ABC compost runs two to three  workshops per semester to educate members of the Concordia community on how to set up their own vermicomposters, how to maintain these worm habitats, what to feed them, and how to use the finished compost in gardens or potted plants.

The event itself is free, but students can also take a kit home for $15. This is important as Rokakis said that cost can be a barrier to access, with vermicomposting kits selling for hundreds of dollars. Composting worms alone can cost upwards of $80 per 227 grams. 

Both Rokakis and fellow co-founder Isabella Curiel-Ploumis recommend that participants harvest the vermicompost two weeks to a month after initially putting food scraps in the bin.

Biology student Ralf Suertegosa attended a workshop in late March of this year and took a bin home.

“I learned from this workshop, first of all, how to compost properly,” Suertegosa said. 

“I decided to take it home, try it out for myself and hopefully get better at it.”

Zero Waste Concordia, which officially launched ABCompost in August 2022, is a sustainability-focused unit initially under the university's Facilities Management office. At the time, the group operated out of the Z Annex on Mackay St., using the building’s basement to house its collections of worm bins.

The location changed when the building was affected by a flood in May 2024. 

“We lost thousands of worms, like at least 10 to 20 thousand worms, if not more,” Rokakis said. 

She added that concerns about lead contamination in the floodwater meant the remaining compost and surviving worms had to be discarded for safety. Fortunately, not all the worms perished, but the vermicompost produced from over 90 kg of food waste had to be disposed of due to the contamination.

At the same time, Concordia faced budget cuts and began consolidating sustainability programs, Rokakis explained. She added that Zero Waste Concordia was absorbed into the university’s Office of Sustainability, and ABCompost lost its funding and workspace. 

Additionally, she said that the Z Annex was closed indefinitely, leaving the group scrambling.

Faisal Shennib is an environmental specialist at the Concordia Office of Sustainability. He acknowledged the general “budget compressions” taking place at Concordia and saw a drastic change in the budget situation. Shennib said this meant that the office was unable to commit to funding organizations previously covered by the Zero Waste program.

“The right thing was to let ABCompost be taken on by a group that was excited and willing to right away dedicate funding towards them,” Shennib said. “It's not impossible that we wouldn't have been able to find support, but we are generally reorganizing our office, trying to figure out what we're going to focus on.”

ABCompost found its new home in September 2024 following an offer from the Concordia Greenhouse. They were able to repopulate their worm population using survivors, as well as red wrigglers purchased from a vermicompost supplier in British Columbia, using funds given by Greenhouse, according to Rokakis. 

“[Vermicomposting bins] you can do inside. You can do it all year round. Many students who live in apartment buildings, they don't have access to municipal composting services,” Rokakis said. “Our primary motivation for delivering the workshops is to help those students who want to compost but can't due to these issues in our composting system.”

Montreal launched a citywide composting pilot project in 2020, expanding collection to select high-rise buildings in four boroughs that included four thousand units respectively. By the end of September 2025, the city has committed that all buildings of nine units or more in the Ville Marie neighbourhood will have food waste collection.

Rokakis explained that despite these developments, there are hurdles to being part of the city’s “brown bin,” or composting, system. 

“Even if your building is eligible, [this] doesn't necessarily mean that your landlord will give you a composting bin,” she said.

In October 2024, the city announced the opening of its own composting plant, located in the Saint-Laurent borough. The plant allows organic waste from city residents in the West Island and the Pierrefonds-Roxboro, Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève, Lachine, and Saint-Laurent boroughs to be processed nearby. Previously, organic waste had to travel 188 km away.  

In contrast, Shennib said that Matrec—a division of Green for Life, the company that manages the organic waste collected from Concordia facilities—brings organic waste to be composted to Moose Creek, Ontario, which is about 150 km from Montreal.

Shennib said he is aware that people have called this distance “unacceptable,” to which he responds that this is standard for distance waste travels.  

“It's not ideal. Obviously, we'd like it to be closer, but there literally are no other options that are available to us as a public institution that has to pay to have its waste taken away,” Shennib said.

A 2023 review from the Journal of Environmental Management comparing vermicomposting technologies found that it is still the preferred choice over traditional composting and pyrolysis, the chemical decomposition of organic materials using heat. This is because vermicomposting “is efficient, effective, low cost, possesses economic benefit through the sale of earthworms and is an environmental friendly waste valorisation process.”

Yet scaling the practice beyond small, self-contained bins remains difficult. Shennib was involved with past vermicomposting and other composting efforts on campus at Concordia back in the late 2000s, before the city offered the brown bin collection they have today. 

“We moved away from [small and medium scale composting] and we moved towards sort of just ‘take it away and deal with it’ and we can compost as much as we want, which was a nice benefit,” Shennib said, “but the downside is the disconnect. People don't have that experience of composting; you're not getting the output.”

Rokakis finds the hands-on aspect of composting—including witnessing how food turns into compost—to be therapeutic.  

“It makes me feel good about doing something good for the planet, taking direct action,” Rokakis said. “Even though it's small action, it still brings community together.”