It's all rubbish, really

Worms at work on a compost heap. Photograph: Jane Perrone
Of all the activities to try to convince people to spend their hard-earned cash and precious time on, composting has to be one of the hardest. I can sum the problem up in four words. Rotting. Worms. Philippa Forrester.

For it is she of Robot Wars and Tomorrow's World fame who is the face of Recycle Now's Home Composting Campaign for 2006, crowned by this week's Compost Awareness Week.

Despite a celebrity endorsement, and a compost bus touring the country (the mind boggles, but apparently it's not a bus full of worms and semi-decomposed lettuces, as I'd first imagined, but an open-top bus on which the top deck is a garden), Recycle Now faces an uphill struggle in promoting composting to the two-thirds of the population who aren't already harvesting their potato peelings. I suspect that if you haven't already been swayed by strenuous campaigns by local councils to convince you to compost by offering cut-price or free compost bins, you're unlikely to be softened by the sight of Forrester and family feeding their heap.