International Compost Awareness Week 2024 Poster Contest

Each year, the International Compost Awareness Week Committee holds a poster contest to pick a new design for the annual poster. There is always a new theme for ICAW, which is highlighted on the poster as well as the dates for ICAW. The dates for 2024 are May 5 – 11. The poster contest is open to anyone from anywhere in the world age 14 or older. The video contest is for ages 10 – 13.

The 2024 International Compost Awareness Week (ICAW) theme is truly a collaborative and international effort. Again this year, we teamed up with the International Compost Alliance (ICA), which includes compost associations from around the world, to select: COMPOST… Nature’s Climate Champion! The theme was chosen by participating international partners incorporating the collective focus on one of the initiatives of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which is “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.”

The 2024 theme best reflects the UN goal by highlighting the role compost plays in fighting climate change. Those roles include:

Decreasing methane: Methane, a greenhouse gas twenty-five times as powerful as carbon dioxide, can be significantly reduced through the recycling of organics instead of their being landfilled.
Helping with climate change mitigation: Compost offers a significant answer to climate change mitigation. Compost’s return to the soil serves as a “carbon bank,” helping to store carbon thereby removing it from the atmosphere.
Reducing fertilizer inputs, reducing the pollution created to manufacture those inputs.
Increasing resilience: Compost helps to increase resilience to the effects of climate change such as drought and extreme weather.