Bench Of Life

Climate change is happening and it's really scary. There are many young people who are anxious about it and this is not great for mental health, nor does it spur any positive action to solving the problem.”

Listen to our interview on CBC and read about the Awesome Ottawa award we received for this project.  ⁣

The Bench of Life are community installations where people can come together and have conversations about climate change and think about solutions together. The cool part about these benches is that they are also inconspicuous worm farms – a real solution towards a sustainable future. These worm farms will be used by 4-5 neighbours to compost their kitchen scraps – and there won't be any bugs or smells whatsoever!
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This project will help people validate their climate feelings and get their creative juices flowing by showing them an example of a simple urban solution to living more sustainably. We will train the host sites to manage the worm farm and redistribute the compost back to the soil by feeding neighbourhood trees.”⁣

How it works - ⁣You create an ecosystem for the composting wormies by using a whole bunch of leaves, grass clippings, woodchips etc, and into that ecosystem you add all your kitchen scraps. Simply lift the lid, empty out the food scraps, spread it evenly on the surface, and let the wormies eat it all in about a month. In the winter, the worm farm will remain dormant as the worms go into a state of hibernation when the temperatures fall below 0 C.

We hope to show people that earthworms make great pets to compost, and we also want to educate people about the importance of healthy soils in the fight against climate change, as healthy, living soils have an incredible capacity of storing atmospheric carbon beneath our feet.