Back when I lived in an apartment, I used to cringe during the food-prep phase of every dinner party I threw. With each soufflé or pistou or rellenos con crema, I was throwing away entire garbage bags full of carrot butts, peanut shells and grapefruit rinds.

Sure, you can turn a lot of that stuff into stock — but even after all the simmering, that's still a lot of biomass headed for the landfill. (According to the EPA, over 27 million tons of food waste was generated in 2003.) Alas, if only someone had told me about in-kitchen vermicomposting.

Those of us lucky enough to have backyards can dump their unwanted vegetation into freestanding compost bins like the big ol' Biostack Composter from Smith & Hawken. But even without access to land, you can still compost your kitchen waste with worm bins — self-contained composting systems made from wood or plastic bins, usually small enough to store under the sink. In go the onion skins and old tea bags, out comes rich, crumbly compost.

You can easily make your own with a plastic storage tub from any big-box store like Target — $12 for an appropriately sized unit — by punching some air vents in the top and sides. (Get a tinted tub; worms don't like light.) But for a few dollars more you can get the Mini Vermi-Composter from Composters.com, a squat, 12x12x15 plastic bin with a vented lid and screened bottom. For another $20, you can get a pound of the requisite worms, Eisenia foetida, a.k.a. red wrigglers. Throw some damp, shredded newspaper into the bin for them to burrow under, add a few handfuls of dirt or potting soil (foetidae need a little grit in their diet), and the worms are ready for your organic garbage – coffee grounds and filters, egg shells, leek roots, squash stalks, stale bread, leftover takeout rice, even used paper towels. Just avoid anything with oils (like dressed salad), fats (buttered bread), dairy or meat; composting the heavy stuff is a process too complex for the kitchen-bin amateur. As they digest your garbage, the worms leave behind solid fertilizer – composting nerds call it worm "castings," but I'm not afraid to call it what it is, genuine, grade-A worm poop – and compost "tea," both of which filter through the Mini's base onto a waiting tray. From there you can use it to fertilize your houseplants, indoor herb garden, community plot, you name it. (Last spring I gave a few pounds of compost to my tomato-growing neighbor; a constant stream of enormous ripe tomatoes was my reward.)

The Mini can handle the food scraps generated by a two-person household; in general, a pound of worms can eat around a half a pound a day. More worms can, of course, eat more scraps, but you'll need more room as well, about a square foot of space for each pound of food waste. Organic matter doesn't break down in landfills, it just sits there, immortal, taking up space. A single apartment building of kitchen composters could keep thousands of pounds of food waste out of the landfills every year.

For a thorough breakdown of vermicomposting, check out Mary Appelhof's encyclopedic Worms Eat My Garbage.

The Original Vermi-Composter Mini

Why We Like It: Convenient composting for the apartment-bound: under-sink sizing, opaque sides, lid vents and a screened base

Cost: $40 for the bin; $20 for a pound of worms

Where to Buy It: composters.com