In Flanders, Vlaco npo supports and implements sustainable biowaste management, especially through home composting. Vlaco is a membership organisation with representation of both the Flemish government (OVAM and inter-municipal waste associations) and the private sector (private waste treatment companies). The ‘Biocycling at home’ unit of Vlaco focuses on raising environmental awareness concerning organic waste management via a twofold awareness approach.
An initial ‘Home Composting’ scheme evolved to the ‘Closed Loop Gardening’ scheme and finally, since 2012, the ‘BioCycle at Home’ scheme that includes communication about food losses and how to prevent them. The Vlaco unit ‘Biocycling at Home’ has trained several thousand volunteers called ‘Master Composters’ or ‘Biocycle Volunteers’ to assist the municipality in promoting recycling of food waste, lawn clippings and prunings via home composting and compost use, and chicken keeping. About 40 teachers are available to regularly train these volunteers and to update them. In total, 4 000 of those volunteers have been trained in the last 20 years. For the moment, 2 700 of these Master Composters / Biocycle Volunteers are still active (which is about 1 per 2 000 inhabitants). Volunteers are claimed to have better credibility compared with ‘officials’, as they have a rapport with local citizens.
Vlaco also approaches the public directly by: organising courses (about the prevention and processing of organic waste); (co‐)organising campaigns and events (Closed Loop Weekend, Closed Loop Festival, Floralies 2016, etc.); distributing leaflets, brochures, posters (and booklets for those who want to know more about a specific theme); communicating by several types of (social, internet or paper) media, and through inter-municipal waste associations and local environmental services; using other educational materials (demonstration tools about processing organic residues, compost boxes and bins, wormeries, insect hotels, mulch mowers, wood chippers, school games, compost information box, etc.).
Results are tracked through screening of the behaviour of citizens every five years. In 1991, 5 % of the people in Flanders were composting at home. By 2012, this percentage had increased to 52 %. Vlaco estimate that 106 000 to 120 000 tonnes of organic waste is processed at home by composting, equating to between 16 kg and 19 kg per inhabitant per year. Their research indicates that 40 % of home composters are managing the process exactly according to best practice, and the vast majority of the home-produced compost is of an acceptable quality. 91 % of respondents that are compost at home do not experience problems with the composting itself or with the quality of the home compost. Almost all the compost produced is used at home.