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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The sixth floor of the Scotia Centre is home to a group of tireless government workers who toil in shadows year round, never take a day off, and whose work only bears fruit a couple months each year.

These industrious beings constantly do the government's dirty work and are poorly paid - surviving exclusively on mere table scraps - and they live in Simon Toogood's filing cabinet.

The worms munching away at organic waste - known as vermicomposting - in Toogood's office are just one of the ways the Department of Environment and Natural Resources' Green Team is reducing waste and attempting to make its operation more environmentally-friendly.

Toogood said the Green Team group came together about a year ago and is not meant to be a highly-structured organization. An invitation to meet is sent out every month or so and whoever shows up brainstorms and throws around ideas on how the office can save energy and reduce waste.

At the moment, office staff compost, set printer defaults to print on both sides of the paper, are pushing to move to 100 per cent recycled paper, are trying to ensure computers are turned off at night and have moved to purchase only fair-trade coffee.

Toogood said he has gone through about nine or 10 containers of worms since he began composting and said there is no shortage of chow for the worms to feed on.

"With government work here, we go through a bunch of coffee," he said, pointing to some decomposing filters in the blue bins.

Toogood, who owns a plot in the community garden, said the vermicomposting keeps organic waste out of the landfill and produces much better fertilizer than the stuff at the store.

"It's night and day," he said, adding he used the compost on one half of his plot and "it looked like a jungle."

Alicia Korpach, waste reduction co-ordinator, has taken advantage of a free national program to try to keep heavy metal out of the dump.

Her beef is not with Metallica, but with toxic metals that go un-recycled at the landfill.

She has set up a box in the department's photocopy room where employees can discard their old cell phones and rechargeable batteries, which contain cadmium, nickel and even mercury.

"The heavy metals that are contained in the batteries are a real concern," she said, adding there is danger of them getting into soils or water systems.

The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation sends a box to municipalities, government agencies, businesses and other organizations to collect these items. Once full, the box can be sent back free of charge for proper recycling.

"It's easy and it's free," she said.

"There's no reason why we can't be involved in that on an office-by-office basis."

Korpach said presently there isn't much in the way of recycling rechargeable batteries in the North. To her knowledge, the box in her office is the only one in the NWT.

She said a few businesses and the city were looking to start up the program.

"It's growing, so that's a good thing."

And government seems to be taking notice.

Weledeh MLA Bob Bromley has referenced the Green Team on a number of occasions in the legislative assembly and Ken Hall, manager of environmental protection, said deputy ministers from all departments recently met to discuss interest in establishing an inter-departmental Green Team.

He said other departments were already doing green things: the Department of Transportation uses a Smart Car, the Department of Public Works sends unwanted, old computers and accessories to a recycling company in Alberta, and Environment and Natural Resources employees in Inuvik carpool to their out-of-town office.

These ideas, he said, could be pooled together.

Representatives from each department will meet to draft some terms of reference, which will look at how "government can do its business in an environmentally-friendly way," said Hall, and potentially even effect policy changes.

While Toogood said Green Teams aren't new - Environment Canada has had them for some time - he agreed it was neat to see the grassroots work getting the support of deputy ministers and higher-ups.

"Given our name," said Toogood, who works in environmental protection, "we should be a leader."