Towards the Italian Network of Home Composters

by Francesco Rasero

Until May 8th it will be celebrated the “Compost Awareness Week”, the international week for promoting home composting. Since 2005 initiatives throughout the world have been accomplishing. Born in Canada in 2005 on the initiative of the Composting Council of Canada, this year has the theme "Let's grow up!", that means spreading the practice of home composting through events and media to encourage people to practice this form of self-disposal organic/green waste and push the Public Administrations to encourage this behavior, through appropriate legislation.

The Week was widely planned in Australia, where the site www.compostweek.com.au works for all the events in the national territory. It has been planned also in the United Kingdom, sponsored by Recycle Now, the government program that in the past months had already created the "Love Food Hate Waste".

In Italy the first experimental edition is currently ongoing, with the birth of a new website (www.noicompostiamo.it) which serves as reference for all home composters, with the aim of creating an “Italian Network of Home Composters”, whose official foundation is scheduled for next fall.
The primary objective of the Network is to bring together and coordinate the different reality on the national territory, in order to encourage the promotion of home composting in all its forms (individual and collective), giving its members the opportunity to access to information through exchange of knowledge and advice, sharing experiences and pooling resources and expertise. The Italian Network of home composters aims to act as true national reference for anyone - individual, group or entity - that wants to engage these issues in first-person.

Noicompostiamo.it is also on Facebook, it is the first "step” in a “path” that has to be built together with all those who will join the project- it will end in Autumn when the "Network" will be born with a founding meeting scheduled in November 2010. After that time, membership of the Network will become effective with the request to pay a (minimum) annual membership fee in exchange for a real community life: in the meantime you can subscribe online to the "Manifesto of the home composters" in order to make a first symbolic gesture of commitment to the Italian Network of Home Composters.
The site also contains basic FAQ on home composting, with the possibility to read the stories of those who already make this practice.