Society is reconsidering composting, this ancient technology, for the treatment and recycling of municipal organic wastes. Municipalities are now encouraging the use of home composting when very little is known about the environmental impact of this practice as compared to other more conventional means. Furthermore, there is a need to establish a standard method to evaluate the impact of such a practice, when the diversified tools presently used produce data which cannot be compared. Within the European project Life-Miniwaste, a study was conducted to establish a standard method to evaluate the mass and composition of the treated biowaste. This standard method used a combination of well recognized tools: conducting household surveys; getting households to measure the mass of biowaste (BW) fed into the composters, and measuring collected waste production and its residual organic fraction (ROF). The standard method can be considered valid if its results correspond to that of other projects. Once validated the standard method can be used by other municipalities to assess the impact of home composting in their own communities and compare their results with other region. The project was conducted in the sector of Cesson-Sevigne, a suburb of the City of Rennes, France. Within the 1,000 households contacted, all living in individual homes, 300 were surveyed to characterize their organic waste (OW) management practices. People of 60 years and over were found to be most likely to practice composting. The telephone survey was also used as a simple tool to recruit households to further the study and monitor the mass and type of biowaste actually composted. Accordingly, 38 households volunteered to weight their fed biowaste during the course of one year : The OW originated either from their kitchens or their yards. To measure the impact of home composting on the recycling the organic fraction of municipal solid wastes, four campaigns were carried out in parallel, to characterize the content of the collected waste produced by some of the volunteer households (weighing their biowaste feeding for composting) and other non-volunteer composting households and other households only garbaging their biowaste. The statistical analysis of the results indicated some differences in compost practices with seasons due to the fact that volunteer households had better practices. In this study, the combination of several tools provided a more complete picture of composting practices. The declared practices, from the survey, must be compared with the biowaste composted. Evaluating the collected waste mass and composition provided a better picture of the impact of composting because households not practicing composting garbaged more ROW. Finally, the standard method developed proposes first of all, a survey to measure OW production for households which do and do not practice composting. These measurements are completed by measuring the biowaste composition (kitchen waste and yard trimmings), and the generation as well as ROW content of garbage.