An Upper Darby business is finding new ways to use those food scraps that often are thrown in the trash, eventually ending up in a local landfill.

The efforts of Mother Compost offer the community a chance to be educated on making sustainable choices, writes Wakisha Bailey and Mike Spatocco for CBS News Philadelphia.  

“Food scraps are not waste,” Mother Compost owner and co-founder Gwenn Nolan said. “We can recycle them effectively via the composting process and turn them into all-natural fertilizer.”

In 2018, Nolan decided she wanted to make composting simple and easy for her fellow residents.

The idea came to her kids refused to eat anything, leading to a lot of wasted food being generated at home.

Now, there’s an alternative.

“We provide our residential subscribers a bucket, we pick it up every other week, we clean the container,” Nolan said. “We also send reminders.”

The waste is taken to Linvilla Orchards, where it is processed by Kitchen Harvest and turned into compost.

These days, Mother Compost serves more than 1,400 customers.

“We create a ton of trash in this country, and composting is a way to effectively recycle a quarter to almost half of what we are throwing away,” Nolan said.

Find out more about Mother Compost at CBS News Philadelphia.