Economic assessment system towards sustainable composting quality in the developing countries

Reduction of landfills and dealing with the waste are among the key elements of the cleaner production and advanced environment policy. Composting represents one of the cleaner technologies in diverting organic waste from landfill. However, it has not been commonly practised in the developing countries due to low economic feasibility and environmental issues that arise from the abuse of compost quality. There are a lack of product standards and an indication of compost quality to govern its market and application. In order to foster public confidence in compost utilisation and as much as possible offset the operating cost, an economic assessment system is needed to benchmark the quality of the compost at a reasonable cost. In this study, a set of composting parameters and their analysis have been reviewed and ranked following their total scores in terms of relation to the agronomic value, technical complexity and analysis cost. The parameters were selected based on different assessment criteria. An assessment system developed on the base of the decision analysis comprises minimal analyses needed to assess the compost quality. The cost savings results from the presented work are illustrated by four scenarios: Scenario 1 served as the baseline to include all the necessary analyses and the remaining three (Scenarios 2, 3 and 4) had been evaluated by the developed assessment system. It is shown that the cost to assess the compost quality was reduced from 17 to 84 % depending on the type of input material and composting performance. The highest cost saving based on the analysis of compost quality reaching 84 % was achieved by Scenario 4 where composting was carried out using the segregated food and landscape waste. The assessment system could be very useful for improving the compost utilisation towards sustainable composting in the developing countries.