This Standard specifies requirements and procedures to determine whether a plastic material is biodegradable in home composting conditions and provides the basis to allow labelling of materials or products made from plastics as ‘home compostable', for use in home composting systems.

This Standard stipulates pass/fail criteria addressing biodegradability, disintegration during biological treatment, effect on the biological treatment process and effect on the quality of the resulting home compost.

Home composting systems vary considerably in their design, construction and operation; hence their performance also varies considerably compared to commercial composting facilities. Consequently, this Standard, in comparison to AS 4736, uses lower temperatures in test environments and a longer test duration, to account for such variations in home composting performance.