Procedia Environmental Science, Engineering and Management http://www.procedia-esem.eu Procedia Environmental Science, Engineering and Management 3 (2016) (1) 33-39 20th International Trade Fair of Material & Energy Recovery and Sustainable Development, ECOMONDO, 8th-11th November, 2016, Rimini Fiera, Italy TWELVE YEARS OF QUALITY ASSURANCE SYSTEM ON COMPOST IN ITALY  Alberto Confalonieri**, Jenny Campagnol, Vera Brambilla, Massimo Centemero Italian Composting and Biogas Association (CIC), via Cavour 183a, 00184 - Roma, Italy Abstract The development of separate collection of biowaste, mainly driven by foodwaste and garden waste collection, has been accompanied by the growth of a recycling industry that in 2014 counted as many as 298 facilities that have treated, through composting and anaerobic digestion, around 6 Mt of waste, with an estimation of 1.5Mt of compost produced. According to the Italian legislation, a compost complying to the standards of the Law on Fertilizers represents the end-of-waste status for organic waste, which makes it freely marketable and actually utilised in several applications, ranging from organic fertilization in agriculture (roughly 80% of the market) to the production of growing media for domestic and professional purposes. Keywords: compost, food waste, garden waste, organic fertilizers, Quality Assurance System 1. Introduction A strong pressure is being made on EU countries in order to turn Europe into an actual recycling society. In this respect, significant provisions have been introduced by the Waste Framework Directive (EC Directive 98, 2008) requiring Member States to take measures to meet the goal of 50% recycling of household waste until 2020 (although the introduction of different methods for the calculation of this goal has created quite confusion in the system), and explicitly stressing the importance of biowaste separate collection and recycling (Guerini et al., 2015; Tatàno et al., 2015). It is worth mentioning that, according to the Circular Economy Package recently adopted by the European Commission, more  Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the ECOMONDO ** Corresponding Author: e-mail: confalonieri@compost.it, Phone: +39 (0)6 4740589