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When the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town got into worm-poo farming last year this wasn’t just good news for the plants in the international hotel’s elegant gardens, or the experimental beginnings of a new range of organic sauces for their famous R150 hamburger. At a dinner for 150 guests from the media and the tourism industry, the hotel introduced its worm farming operations as the first stage in developing and marketing itself as an international green hotel.

Vermicomposting (compost from worm castings) may be on its way to revolutionising how we recycle organic waste – if people can love the worm enough to keep bins full of them in their homes. It’s just beginning to catch the imagination of urban greenies who fancy the idea of feeding their organic leftovers into a compact apparatus from which they can tap high quality plant food, thanks to the digestive efforts of Eisenia foetida and Eisenia ardenii earthworms. The gentle worms’ sweet-smelling waste can be chalked up as a saving on expensive plant foods.

The Mount Nelson called in the help of local eco consultancy FullCycle, who specialise in alternative waste management and disposal, and who market a version of the home worm farm. FullCycle’s Mary Murphy says the earthworms they sell are grown at FullCycle’s own farms. “Lots of people are interested,” says Murphy. “but the awareness isn’t really there yet. People are little bit worried that something so complicated could be so simple.”

So far no South Africans have begun marketing worm poo itself, but lest anyone be thinking seriously about it, the experience of a small US company may provide food for thought – or at least for a little precautionary strategising. Domestic fertilisers are after all fairly big business, and in the US represent billions of dollars in sales.

TerraCycle Inc began producing and marketing natural plant fertilisers a couple of years ago, packaging a worm poo-based liquid in brightly-labelled used cooldrink bottles. The company was founded in 2001 by a bunch of under-25-year-olds whose business ethic has led them to setting up operation in an “urban enterprise zone” in crime- and unemployment-riddled Trenton, New Jersey. The TerraCycle website includes an essay on “eco capitalism” which displays rather more of a left-liberal bent to it than the diatribes provided by Jim Hagedorn, CEO of Scotts Miracle-Gro, the domestic fertiliser giant that is challenging TerraCycle’s very right to exist.

“What I like about this company is we kind of said 10 years ago that we’re going to take over the world. And we did,” said Hagedorn in a 2005 interview. “Now it’s important to drive it to the next level.”

Scotts, as the leading US plant food producer, sees annual sales of over $2,5bn, compared to around $130m for TerraCycle. But the eco-capitalist company clearly poses a threat to the aggressive Scotts, which has introduced its own range of organic fertilisers – though worm droppings don’t yet feature in any of their plant menus.

Scotts’ chief charge concerns TerraCycle’s product marketing – they claim that TerraCycle’s plant food packaging features the same range of bright yellow and green as its own products. That TerraCycle claims its product to be superior to that of “a leading synthetic plant food” also worries them. Scotts has given TerraCycle a 50-page letter of demands: they want information on every product, copies of all their press releases, copies of all emails regarding customer relations and so on.

The lawsuit is costing TerraCycle plenty, and may set them back several million dollars. The company is fighting back on the basis that hundreds of other garden-food products are marketed in the same range of colours Scotts claim for their own, and point out that Scotts have sued 20 companies in the last ten years.

“I’m worried we may have poked the giant in the eye,” says TerraCycle’s Albert Zakes, “And now he’s going to come out of the cave.”

Jim Hagedorn sees business as “economic warfare”, and describes Scotts as “a competition-machine, not a garden-fertiliser business”. “I kind of want to be at war all the time and people aren’t always comfortable with that,” he says.

With the upcoming lawsuit getting its share of media attention in the US, and TerraCycle launching its own Web-based campaign around the confrontation, the worm-poo company’s sales have jumped significantly.

Regardless of the strength of Scotts’ legal claims, consumers are likely to perceive the lawsuit as a corporate giant using the legal system to try to put a fledgling competitor out of business.

“The best case outcome is that there is so much publicity generated and so much negative will generated towards Scotts that they drop the lawsuit,” says TerraCycle CEO and co-founder Tom Szaky, who is described as “a twenty-five-year-old Hungarian-born refugee college drop-out”.

Meanwhile, back home, FullCycle probably represent the leading edge in new solutions to domestic waste disposal that are based, as their name indicates, in understanding whole cycles of human and natural interactions. “Between 21% and 40% of municipal solid waste in South African cities is organic (by weight) – up to 45% if you include paper and cardboard. If the soil component of this waste is included, more than half the waste sent to landfill can be used as a growing media for plants,” says Mary Murphy.

The Mount Nelson Hotel isn’t the most likely base of operations for the upcoming eco capitalist wars, but you never know.