Australian AS 5810 standard specifies requirements and procedure 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 system.

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. In term of biodegradability evaluation, the test method refers to ISO 14855 which is method for determination of the ultimate aerobic biodegradability of plastics materials under controlled composting conditions based on analysis of evolved carbon dioxide. As alternative methods, either ISO 14851 or ISO 14852 shall be used. 

BPC Blue is a fully automated biodegradability testing system suitable for AS 5810 and may be configured to evaluate aerobic biodegradability of polymer samples under the same temperature range of controlled composting conditions using industrial compost as inoculum. Utilising an in-situ carbon dioxide absorption kit, BPC Blue functions as a closed-respirometer for continuous and on-line measurement of oxygen consumption or depletion caused by aerobic respiration of microorganisms.