In November 1997 the UK Composting Development Group was set up to look at the problem of marketing waste-derived compost to all sectors, including agriculture and land restoration, and to develop proposals to overcome these obstacles.
The Group's main conclusion was that the principal barrier to more widespread use of compost was the negative perception of it as a product, and that the fundamental problem is the absence of accepted standards. Two of its key recommendations, therefore, were that work on the development of standards should be urgently undertaken, stressing that different standards were necessary for different applications, and, in parallel with this, that greater publicity and information/education measures were needed to improve the public's and professionals' perception.
Local authorities could play a significant role in the development of composting, particularly as users of compost from their own centralised facilities; this had yet to be developed sufficiently.