When you finish your banana, what happens to the peel? Most people act on three choices: They can grind it up in the sink disposal, using eight gallons of our precious pure water to flush one gallon of food waste through pipes to a central sewage treatment plant, where billions are spent in futile attempts to separate the two. The effluent, now poisoned with chemicals but still rich in nutrients, is dumped into the nearest body of water, in our case, the ocean, where earth-based plant nutrients, lost from the terrestrial ecosystem, become pollutants.

Or, they toss the banana peel into the nearest trash can or Dumpster, where it decomposes just enough to draw flies, roaches, ants and rats. It is picked up by a truck burning fossil fuel that must now travel our congested roadways to a waste "management" facility.

At the Waimanalo Gulch landfill in Nanakuli, the material is buried, but not before it really pollutes the area. Once buried and lacking the presence of oxygen, anaerobic bacteria predominate, creating toxins, potentially leaching into soil and sea. Once again, the valuable plant nutrients in your banana peel are lost forever.

The garbage truck may instead drop its load at H-Power, O'ahu's waste-to-energy facility. Great idea, burning waste to create electricity. The banana peel, however, is food or "wet" waste, and will decrease the efficiency of the furnace because of its moisture content. And those rich banana-peel nutrients finally are eliminated. Another dead end.

There are some conscientious people — old-timers, mostly, and a tiny percentage of our population — who bury their food in the backyard, or keep a compost pile. The nutrients of the banana peel are simply, efficiently, returned to the earth — on site — where they can be recycled back to the garden. But this is not feasible for most of us, especially in urban areas.

Over the past couple of years, thousands of people on O'ahu started recycling their food waste by keeping a kitchen colony of worms, an easy-to-learn practice called vermicomposting. It didn't take legislative action, public debate, union contract negotiations or increased taxes — just a personal decision to do the right thing, and a handful of Perionyx excavatus, our local composting worm.

On O'ahu, we generate 50,000 tons of food waste annually, approximately 15 percent of the waste stream. The average household generates four pounds of food or wet waste each week, so 5,000 vermicomposting households process 20,000 pounds, or 10 tons, weekly. That equals 520 tons of garbage this year that did not go down the disposal, into the sewer system and dumped in the ocean; that did not get buried in the landfill and did not clog up the works at H-Power. It may be only a small dent in our total waste load now, but vermicomposters undeniably save landfill space, energy, water and money — and their numbers are growing.

Anyone can manage a worm colony successfully with a little practice. Worms can be kept in any wood or plastic container with holes in the bottom for drainage and holes in the lid for ventilation. They are "bedded" in bits of moist cardboard, shredded office paper or newspaper, and fed banana peels, papaya skins, carrot and potato peelings, orange and pineapple rinds, apple cores, salad trimmings, leftover rice, stale bread, moldy tortillas, egg shells, coffee grounds and tea bags. Worms consume their weight in food waste each day, so a pound of worms can process a pound of waste daily. A well-managed worm bin has no odor whatsoever and requires only minimal care and maintenance.

Every four months or so, the bin is harvested to remove the valuable worm waste, more properly called vermicast. All the nutrients from food waste — nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium, calcium, iron, etc. — are concentrated and packaged by the worm in a form that plants can absorb. Vermicast is not only nutrient-rich, but contains natural pest and disease suppressants and increases the soil's capacity for water retention. Nicknamed "gardener's gold," vermicast is nature's most perfect plant food and soil conditioner.

Recycling plant nutrients back to the soil by feeding garbage to worms makes sense. We currently spend millions shipping tons of polluting chemical fertilizers from the Mainland when everything we need to enrich our soil and promote healthy plant growth — for agriculture, landscaping, lawns and gardens — is piling up right under our nose. When we begin to seriously regard waste as a resource, we become interested in learning exactly how to recover and use it to our benefit. Vermicomposters will tell you that the worms have forever changed the way they think about garbage.

Most parts of the world are way ahead of us on this one. "Reduce, reuse, and recycle" as public policy has incentivized innovation and a booming biocycle industry. In Australia, Canberra is closing in on its goal to become the first "zero waste" city by 2010, meaning no trash bags. The city long ago closed its landfill and opened a resource recovery facility. Standard and worm composting technology handles all organic waste including humanure, which is recycled for agricultural use, completely pathogen-free. A 70-acre worm farm outside Modesto, Calif., processes 300 tons of cardboard sludge daily. In South Wales, an 18-million-worm facility vermicomposts the organic waste from 30,000 households.

Those who care about Hawai'i's environment are not waiting for a government program to get started on this path. Because we cannot import worms into the state, we are limited to a small (and expensive) local supply. However, a handful of 100 small worms will reproduce in a geometric progression to yield 100 million worms within 10 years. As individuals, we literally hold the future of responsible food waste management in one hand.

Those who attended the First Annual Hawai'i Worm Conference yesterday — the state's first Zero Waste event — are pioneers in the burgeoning grass-roots vermicomposting movement. They explored optimal ways to use their worms to process waste at home, school and workplace. They learned the nuances of recycling vermicast to increase soil fertility and eliminate pollutants and contaminants.

"Zero waste" is not just a catch-phrase — it takes a change in thinking and living, as does basic recycling. And for the residents of our state, where landfill space is limited, it is crucial that we all get onboard.

The sugar-cane bagasse plates, bowls and cups used at the event, paper towels from the restrooms and food waste will all be fed to an on-site worm colony. All conference materials — from the 100-percent-recycled-plastic-soda-bottle tote bag to the sports cup to the corn polymer pens — were from recycled or renewable sources. These kinds of environmentally conscious materials can be — and should be — used by everyone.

The state has long way to go in terms of creating an efficient waste management program. Until that happens, we can all take a small step toward making a huge, positive impact.

Mindy Jaffe is the owner of the Waikiki Worm Co. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.