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TO celebrate Compost Awareness Week 2008, Recycle Now is offering any resident of Cumbria who buys a compost bin between 4th and 10th May the chance to win £50 of garden centre vouchers to spend on their garden.

Compost Awareness Week is designed to encourage everyone to Green up the Environment'. We can all help the planet and keep our gardens in bloom - by home composting our kitchen and garden waste or using peat-free composts containing recycled materials.

Home Composting is a simple and cheap way of dealing with up to a third of a typical family's waste bin, and it is a brilliant way to help the environment.

When organic garden and food waste is sent to landfill, it is crushed beneath large amounts of other household waste.

This means there isn't any oxygen present when it breaks down, so it produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. By composting at home, waste such as fruit and vegetable peelings can break down in an oxygenated environment so no methane is produced.

This also creates a rich fertilizer for the garden which completes the natural cycle and keeps waste out of landfill.

And it's not just fruit and vegetable peelings that you can compost - toilet roll tubes, coffee grounds, tea bags, and egg boxes will all add nutrients to the mix. Almost anything organic can be composted, from shredded confidential documents and scrunched up cereal boxes to grass cuttings.

All this waste breaks down naturally to create a free product that can be used to keep plants and gardens looking green and beautiful - and it even helps the soil to retain moisture, which is particularly good news during the hot summer months.

Caring for the environment by home composting is such a simple and effective way of making a difference that celebrities such as Helen Mirren, Jenny Seagrove, Chris Evans and June Sarpong are all adding their active support and committing to compost at home.

This Compost Awareness Week, BBC presenter Philippa Forrester is backing the campaign to make sure that waste is recycled at home rather than ending up on landfill sites.

She said: "With three young children, I've never been more aware of the impact we make on the environment and the responsibility of bringing future generations into a world that we can really be proud of.

"Composting at home is just one small step towards making sure that we minimise the amount of waste we create, but if everybody gets involved then it makes a huge difference."

Since the Recycle Now Home Composting campaign launched, 1.7 million compost bins have been bought - and if you don't compost already, there has never been a better time to start.

Anyone living in Cumbria who places an order from the 4th - 10th May 2008 will be entered into the free prize draw to win £50 of garden centre vouchers, which have been donated by DHL, the logistics company that deliver the bins.

Check out the website www.recyclenow.com/compost or phone 0845 077 0757 for more details.

To find out what is happening in your area for Compost Awareness Week, check the event locator on our website: www.compostawarenessweek.org.uk.

10:26am Monday 5th May 2008

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