Is Compost Awareness Enough?

International Compost Awareness Week has come and gone but for us, every week should be about composting! Or, at least we should be making sure we’re doing it every week with our organic waste. Right now very few people are so we’re taking a good look into why that’s the case.

The stats are proving initiatives like ICAW are working - people certainly are aware of the importance of compost.

While 71% of Americans don’t recycle their organic waste, 67% would compost if it were more convenient for them. What’s more, 77% fully understand the importance of organic waste recycling to the environment.

And it’s not just individuals either - businesses are quickly waking up to the need for and importance of composting. Here in Australia, 76% of businesses believe waste management improves their public perception, which in turn leads to business successes.

So if everyone understands it’s benefits and has these positive attitudes toward compost, why is only 10% of organic waste recycled? These figures simply don’t add up with what’s currently going on.

Only 8% of Americans compost their waste and that number’s dropping. On the corporate side, 58% of businesses keep no record of how much waste they produce and have no plans for reduction.

It’s pretty obvious from these sorts of facts that being aware of the importance of composting is just not enough to engage people to do it. There must be something else.

From research that we’ve conducted ourselves, the biggest factor preventing people from starting composting is simply that they don’t know how to, with almost half of respondents citing this reason. The other major barriers are concerns over composting itself, including effort required and potential odours produced.

Awareness isn’t enough. To achieve 100% of organics recycling, we need to overcome these barriers and make composting easy and efficient for everyone. Which is exactly what our compost monitoring system does, by tracking your compost data and using it to generate custom management recommendations.

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