"But the biggest obstacle is that the residents may not feel comfortable raising so many worms in the room," said Cui.
The residents also have concerns such as whether the earthworms will get out of the box and whether the box will produce peculiar smell.
"The fermenting process does produce a sour smell," explained Cui. The residents need to feed the earthworms regularly and take good care of the boxes, she added.
Using earthworms to decompose kitchen garbage has been very popular in Japan and America, and almost every Japanese household has a mall earthworm-breeding box, said Feng Jianguo, a research fellow at the Beijing Research Center for Rural Economy.
But he warned that garbage sources should be strictly classified to prevent harmful substances from entering into "kitchen garbage" and resulting in contamination of feeds and fertilizers produced by the waste.
Some garbage disposal factories in Beijing have already introduced micro-biological technology to decompose kitchen garbage.
In Shangdi Street of Haidian District, a kitchen garbage disposal station employs natural compound microbiological bacteria to ferment the collected kitchen garbage and produce biological feeds and fertilizers.
This station, after operating for three years, has treated more than ten thousand tons of kitchen garbage and produced biological feeds and fertilizers for more than 60 fruit and 30 vegetable gardens across the city.
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Editor:Yang Jie
