Collecting green and food waste from local residents is costly, and requires a fair amount of infrastructure to turn the waste into a valuable product.

It can also be a difficult and frustrating process to tackle contamination from food and green waste as it enters feedstocks.

But, as the horticultural industry moves to peat free growing media, there is a large need for additional materials to plug the gap of almost 1 million metres cubed of peat that will no longer be available. 

Green and food waste composts also make incredible soil improvers, for both domestic gardeners and in agriculture – however it must be of a high quality and stable. 

That said, there are a number of things you can do:  

• Educate and inform the residents of the need to compost their materials, of how contamination affects our industry and options for home composting and wormeries. 

• Add supplementary information when leafletting and sending out collection calendars. The REAL has 2 schemes in this space to help you maximise the value of the composted outputs:

• CCS - Compost Certification Scheme (qualitycompost.org.uk) 

• Biofertiliser - Certification Scheme