Good practice:

Home composting and economic incentives

Food scraps and yard waste together make up more than 30% of what we throw away, and could be composted instead. Compost is organic material that can be added to soil to help plants grow. To enhance home composting some Councils in Emilia-Romagna region have:
- introduced an economic incentive;
- strengthened support for households.
The City Council of Casalgrande grants a 20% reduction of the variable component of the tariff to citizens who undertake to compost the organic fraction of their waste directly in their garden, through the aid of a domestic composter.
The effect is the reduction of the amount of putrescible and therefore complicated waste to manage with positive effects on collection and a reduction in the costs of treatment and disposal of waste.
Good communication and Environmental education center to train householders are very important factors for the success of the scheme.

The investment is proportional to the number of participants and the amount of the tariff reduction. An average family of 4 people with an area subject to the tariff of about 160 sq m had a reduction of about € 40,00 in 2020. Since 200 householders joined the scheme, total expenditure was € 8.000,00

The users who have declared to carry out domestic composting in Casalgrande are 200.
Considering that the reference value relating to the per capita production of domestical organic waste amounts to 67 kg per inhabitant per year, assuming 2 inhabitants equivalent per household, 26.8 tons is the amount of waste composted at home each year.

• need to carry out checks to demonstrate that domestic composting is actually carried out against the economic incentives assigned
• opportunity to create training courses with schools or citizens in general, on the subject of domestic composting due to the simplicity and immediacy of the subject

The theme of home composting is very intuitive and easy to apply at school or family level, due to the practicality of the theme and the environmental implications.
Home composting is carried out in a very simple way and has no pretensions to large surfaces to be implemented.
It is an extremely intuitive and easily reproducible practice.
Alongside the economic incentives you can think of providing the composters for free, perhaps collaborating with private companies making themselves available to provide them in exchange for advertising.
Controls are not necessary if you offer assistance so as to gain conscious involvement. For example, through the following services:
• shredders to chop up wood waste;
• mechanical sieves to separate the mature compost;
• activators to obtain better compost faster;
• advice to solve any problems;
• quality analysis of the compost produced.