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MIDDLETOWN — A bucket of moldy old food scraps and pizza boxes may not seem like the foundation for a sound business plan, but it is an enriching one for at least one Delco man as Americans discover the importance of composting.

In Delaware County, the expert on composting seems to be Chris Pieretti, the owner of Kitchen Harvest Inc. composting, which is based on the farm at Linvilla Orchards.

“It’s something I kind of fell into as a gardener,” Pieretti said during a break from his chores at the 5-acre operation. “I had hoped (to start a business) to bring gardening to people, as a service to help them grow vegetables.”

However, Pieretti found out that while gardeners like getting their hands dirty, they didn’t always have the right soil conditions.

“Poor soil, it was a problem I kept coming across,” Pieretti said.

Around the same time, he saw a woman in Philadelphia collecting buckets of food scraps and he was intrigued.

“I thought it was the coolest idea, that you could turn your food scraps into a kind of a garden, the soil,” he said. “I tried to figure out how to do it and make a business out of it.”

Pieretti started the business in 2010 though at first he said it was more like an annoying hobby, picking up food scraps and leaves. Then he found a farm with some space, Hillside Farm on the Elwyn campus, which allowed him to spread the operation.

After that farm closed, Pieretti began calling around to other farms in the area and was able to reach out to Steve Linvill at Linvilla Orchards, who was immediately interested.

“We’ve always been concerned with the health of the soil and composting is part of our practice for many years,” said Linvill, who is president of Linvilla Orchards.

Pieretti said his operation has just expanded on Linvilla’s previous operation. The farm had always accepted yard waste; he just expended it.

He collects leaves, which all come in the fall from commercial landscapers. One company alone sends him 40 truckloads a year.

Pieretti said getting a permit from the state to compost on a large scale was an ordeal but understandable. They pay strict attention to preventing odors and pests from infiltrating the operation at Linvilla, he said.

They operate in three locations on the property. The compost takes five to nine months to season. At that point, it is spread onto the farm as part of the crop rotation or sold to the public.

When the food scraps are brought to the farm, they are mixed with leaves that Pieretti has set aside from the fall.

He moves in and mixes the scraps with the leaves as well as spent grains he gets from Sterling Pig Brewery in Media.

The leaves are the major source of compost, three parts leaves to one part food scrap. After the proper mixing, nature takes its course with FBI — fungus, bacteria and insects.  Branches and large debris are sent through a grinder to reduce the size of the material.

Pieretti collects scraps from about 350 residents a month within a 15-mile radius of the farm. As many as a dozen composting groups and businesses such as Easy Compost in Swarthmore and Mother Compost in Wynnewood, are also bringing food scraps to his setup at Linvilla.

“We kind of work more as collaboration than in competition,” Pieretti said. “I think there is enough demand to go around or we’re just really nice people — perhaps a little bit of both.”

“It’s a miraculous thing that happens when you turn a banana peel into zucchini, or asparagus or green bean. It’s magical, and it’s a team effort,” Pieretti said.

Linvill said they have been able to expand their composting efforts tenfold with the local composting program and considers it a bonus that it includes the entire community.

My Kitchen Harvest sells compost with a number of mix blends from the farm.

Pieretti said a number of educational institutions contribute, including Villanova University, Haverford College and Bryn Mawr College.

“We get a lot of interest in the schools,” Pierretti said. “They ask about it then they tend not be able to afford it or the teacher who is excited about it leaves  and that wanes.”

Pieretti has also been instrumental in Media’s municipal composting program which allows the 5,000 residents to recycle their food waste on a weekly basis.

Karen Taussig-Lux, Media Borough grants administrator, described the municipality’s successful composting program at the recent Delaware County Sustainability Conference.

The compost program had been a common topic at Borough Environmental  Advisory Council meetings when four years ago the borough was able to begin a pilot program, funded with $21,000 from the borough  as well as a technical assistance grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Protection.

The program, which started with 100 participants, had Pieretti making the pickup of the five gallon buckets. In the following years they switched to an in-house borough pickup.

As the program matured, officials considered reducing twice a week trash pick up to allow for the composting route but instead incorporated a monthly yard clippings pick up.  Now Media incorporate the composting pick up into its Wednesday yard waste pickups.

“Merging the food waste collection with yard waste means no additional labor cost to the borough,” Taussig-Lux said. “One day is longer but it is the same route.”

The cost for the program’s $5,600 communications budget and $6,900 for 600 buckets were covered by a state grant

The borough bought a new $145,000 compacting trash truck devoted to composting but Taussig-Lux said it replaced an existing backup unit and was not just used for the composting program.

With the success of the program, officials had a happy realization – pizza boxes could be composted!

“There are 3 billion pizza boxes thrown in the trash each year and an estimate that 227,000 pizza boxes are discarded in Media each year,” Tussig-Lux said. “We could potentially turn 22 tons of pizza boxes into rich dark soil every year.”

Pieretti confirmed that pizza boxes, which can’t be recycled because of the cheese and grease on them, can be composted.

“My goodness, people eat a lot of pizza! I had no idea,” Pieretti said.

Up the road on the Main Line, Gwenn Nolan of Mother Compost in Wynnewood seconds the popularity of pizza boxes.

After four years in operation they have just topped 1,000 subscribers with customers in Haverford, Radnor and Lower Merion townships.

Nolan said Havertown, Ardmore and Wynnewood are their fastest- growing areas. They also have customers in Newtown, but the longer travel distances make for increased cost issues.

Residents pay Mother Compost $20-$30 a month to have their 5-gallon buckets picked up on a twice-monthly basis.

The company sends a reminder the day beforehand and they focus on customer service. The buckets come with biodegradable bags.

“We collect the material, we clean the container after every pick up, and we haul the materials directly to Linvilla Orchards,” Nolan said.

They have a number of businesses participating, including a small pilot program at Haverford College, Neumann University, Peachtree Catering and a few religious organizations.

Asked what made Nolan want to start such a business, she said concern for the environment.

“I was really struggling to compost at home, I have two kids, a third on the way and if you ever had the pleasure of having small children you know they waste a ton of food,” she said. “I was trying to combat that in my own home but I was working full time and it was a lot and I struggled. My epiphany was, if this is what it takes, then nobody’s going to compost.”

She said that realization, along with concern about the environment and how much waste humans are creating, convinced her mass composting in communities was what is needed.

“This is a solution,” Nolan said. “We can get 30% of what we are sending to landfills and recycle it, turn it into something we can use and need — that’s a no brainer. I think a lot of people want to do this and have the same kind of anxiety I do, and $20 a month is reasonable.”

“Five dollars a week supporting a local company doing something amazing and dramatically reducing your trash — people can get behind it,” she said. “Composting is proven that it works, you can redirect the waste, and it takes that heavy wet material out of the waste stream.”

Mother Compost also delivers two bags of compost back to customers. They did an analysis and found they have returned 3½ basketball courts of soil back to customers.

Back at Linvilla, Pieretti said his composting farm is the fulfillment of a dream.

“This was always my dream to make this happen — the farm and the community right next to it working in unison, closing the loop,” Pieretti said. “This stuff is getting hauled away no matter what. It’s just who is going to take it and what are they going to do with it.

“Is it going to get incinerated, landfilled? It’s going somewhere. It’s in all the cans — do you want to separate it and take it to a spot that turns into that (points to plants) or goes to some landfill and turns into methane gas? I like this option.

“Costs will come down as more folks like me come on line. There needs to be more receptacles, more farms like this willing to do it,” he said.

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