12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-imagined

by pulisse • 4 months ago

316 123 4 months ago

skipants• 4 months ago

Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".

... why does TicoFruit even care? Did they just see their competitor do something that might be good for people and sue them out of spite?

jaffa2• 4 months ago

I guess tico fruit is just an asshole. Being sued is usually bad. If you can sue your competitor even better.

throwway2625152• 4 months ago

My guess is that Del Oro would have a competitive advantage in its waste disposal costs.

nightpool• 4 months ago

They saw it as corruption, basically. Here's a contemporaneous article: https://apps.sas.upenn.edu/caterpillar/index.php?action=retr...

TicoFrut, which is 98% Costa Rican-owned, charges that the environmental services contract is little more than a permit for improper disposal of its foreign-owned competitor's waste. TicoFrut President Carlos Odio says Del Oro should be compelled to build a proper waste-disposal plant just as his company was forced to do in the mid-1990s amid allegations that orange waste from its juicing plant was polluting a nearby river. So TicoFrut teamed up with a high-profile environmentalist and radio host, Alexander Bonilla, and enlisted the support of two prominent congressmen and a few citrus growers in denouncing the Del Oro project. However, none of Costa Rica's conservation groups joined in the attack on Del Oro.

[...]

One of the ministers they cited was the acting environment minister at the time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, who signed the contract on behalf of the government. Rodriguez, an attorney, denied having sat on Del Oro's board but acknowledged representing the company while working in a law firm contracted by the CDC, Del Oro's British owners. The other official, Agriculture Minister Esteban Brenes, acknowledged having sat on Del Oro's board but denied any involvement with the contract.
TicoFrut also claimed foreign employees of the CDC and, by extension, Del Oro, had received diplomatic immunity as a sweetener to invest, and could thus act with impunity.
The Costa Rican Ombudsman's Office conducted its own review and declared the contract illegal. In its non-binding ruling, the ombudsman's office said no official studies had been done on the viability of the orange-waste experiment, and that due process had not been followed before the contract's signing

underlipton• 4 months ago

In a way, they might have been right. Who knows whether or not a continuation of the active experiment would have pushed it over a tipping point where the positive effects were nullified. Maybe part of the "magic" is that they literally left it there to rot.

jandrese• 4 months ago

I mean it makes sense if you were just forced to implement an expensive waste management system and your competitor gets to just dump the stuff on the ground in a National Park. I would complain too.

MisterTea2• 4 months ago

TicoFrut President Carlos Odio says Del Oro should be compelled to build a proper waste-disposal plant just as his company was forced to do in the mid-1990s amid allegations that orange waste from its juicing plant was polluting a nearby river.

This is the work of a petty man child. This is how it reads to me: "I got caught being a lazy irresponsible cheap-skate who was illegally dumping and had to pay. Meanwhile, these intelligent forward-thinking jerks find an environmentally beneficial way to dispose of their waste for free! I'll show them and take those goody two shoes down a peg!"

proee• 4 months ago

One risk here is that a giant pile of biomass could allow nefarious critters to grow disproportionately. For example, in Alaska, they had giant brush piles that ended up fueling beetle infestations across the state.

bcjdjsndon2• 4 months ago

I wonder what fuelled the human infestation currently ravaging the Americas.

bell-cot2• 4 months ago

This being HN - might there be any Costa Rican lawyers in the house?

It would be extremely interesting to hear about the legal merits of the rival company's lawsuit, and the politics of the Supreme Court.

PaulHoule7• 4 months ago

It's the kind of question that I'd rather see answered by an ecologist than a judge!

bell-cot2• 4 months ago

The kind of issue that's better decided by an ecologist than by a judge, true.

My curiosity is about how the legal system got it wrong - simplistic or outdated laws, or clueless or corrupt judges, or some combination, or something else?

throwway2625152• 4 months ago

As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.

Another data point to the thesis that it's not the earth that needs saving, it's human systems. If disruption becomes the order of the day, who's impacted the worst?

comrade1234• 4 months ago

Why dump the peel when you can use the entire orange to make that nasty orange British drink.

MisterTea2• 4 months ago

As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.

We now understand that fungus plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem. And given how easily fruit and vegetables rot and get moldy, the orange peel mass sounds like the perfect layer for the fungus to thrive in. The dead earth received a live giving blanket yielding healthy soil vegetation can thrive in.

TheGRS2• 4 months ago

They also mentioned that invasive grass species were suppressed by the orange peels which likely contributed to native plants thriving better.

calf3• 4 months ago

They should check for new penicillin strains in this forest.

asplake• 4 months ago

Previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=orange+peel

ethagnawl4• 4 months ago

It's recently occurred to me how "valuable" today's trash is likely to be considered in the future. I'll focus on organics here but I think the plastics will be equally valuable, too.

I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change: food production, habitat restoration, etc. However, most of us are putting organics into refuse streams where they're likely to be burned or buried in a way that's actually harmful because they release methane when they decompose under those conditions. It can be a bit gross and tedious to compost at home but there is a certain satisfaction which comes along with it.

bdcravens• 4 months ago

For those who can't or find dealing with compost a challenge, there are also other options to recycle biowaste. It's a bit of pricey subscription, but we have a Mill which processes most food waste into chicken feed (you do have to mail the processed food to them for further processing).

schrectacular• 4 months ago

The thought occurred to me some 25+ years ago that today's landfills will be tomorrow's mines. I hope it isn't true but taking the very long view I'm afraid it will be.

kleinsch• 4 months ago

Today’s landfills are already used for natural gas generation.

mlyle2• 4 months ago

We already mine landfills -- mostly for land reclamation but sometimes to recover resources.

In the longer run, when there's been more compaction, settling, and densification (and changes in what things are valuable), and more need to reclaim land that was previously landfilled, we will do this more.

65102• 4 months ago

A british inventor created a setup with two long vibrating plates with ferrofluid in between. A flaky powder made from garbage was dumped in on one side and came out the other end beautifully separated in many layers by density. (with one mixed layers in between that went back in at the beginning) Innitially he "knew" it was silly to use something as expensive as ferrofluid but planned to try other substances if it worked. It turned out the process produced a lot more ferrofluid than it used.

No one was interested in further research.

edit: I see some research is now happening.

roboror• 4 months ago

Proud to report residential composting is now mandatory in NYC.

ethagnawl4• 4 months ago

It's doubtful that'll ever happen in Dutchess County but I can dream.

IG_Semmelweiss• 4 months ago

Please elaborate. From what i know based on prior research, most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC ? Are you implying that all buildings have now must build a 3rd chute specifically for compost ? And who's picking up that compost ? NYC Trash collection ?

I've seen compost vending machines in my visits to NYC and a few other places, but i've yet anyone using them

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 months ago

For anthropologists and archaeologists, trash/sewage is gold.

IncreasePosts• 4 months ago

These machines are currently too expensive for widespread adoption, but I love the electric composter I bought that I keep in my garage.

There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.

I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.

acomjean• 4 months ago

I worked for a time designing and building landfills. Nothing really rots in them typically as it’s really dry and don’t have good access to oxygen. Modern landfills are like giant plastic bags. This is to protect ground water.

Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infiltration.

We dug up trash from the 70s to extend the landfill out. It was in remarkably good shape.

https://planetliner.com/landfill-cap/

tonypapousek• 4 months ago

Thanks for the share, crazy that 1-2mm polyethylene is all it takes to cap a landfill.

Practical Engineering put out an excellent video on landfills a couple years back, well worth the watch for the visualizations alone.

https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44

zahlman• 4 months ago

Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn.

Can useful energy be recovered from this?

PaulHoule7• 4 months ago

See https://www.floridatrend.com/article/14356/trashed-plan-to-u...

St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

pstuart• 4 months ago

Yeah, reminds me of Changing World Technologies -- so much hope, so little reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies

In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.

robotnikman• 4 months ago

Apparently that same technology is being used on newer US Navy ships for waste management.

makr17• 4 months ago

California has a low-double-digit percentage of the US population, and mandates organic waste separation/collection.

https://calrecycle.ca.gov/Organics/SLCP/collection/

arnorhs• 4 months ago

Does orange peel not produce any CO2 / methane when left like this? I'm assuming there is some negative carbon footprint before this becomes a positive?

The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.

The article does say

Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.

How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.

laurencerowe• 4 months ago

The orange peel is going to decompose and produce CO2 either way. Methane is produced when there is not enough oxygen available while decomposing, which certainly seems a possibility if it's dumped in big piles.

PaulHoule7• 4 months ago

Mostly.

Remember the orange trees took the CO2 out of the atmosphere to make the peels. Some of it, probably most of it, is going back into the atmosphere but some of it is going to become soil carbon which could be retained for decades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_carbon

Soil carbon is like dark matter in that there is a lot of it and it is poorly understood.

dgacmu3• 4 months ago

You're getting downvoted but it's a reasonable question if posed in good faith. The tl;dr is that there are really a few options for what could happen to those orange peels:

(1) Landfill burial

   (1a) Without methane capture and use: Produces methane, relatively high short term warming potential.
   (1b) With methane capture and use: Ends up as CO2 after burning the methane.

(2) Composting (this approach)

   (2a) Mostly aerobic: Produces CO2
   (2b) Mostly anaerobic: Produces methane

A deep pile that is never turned will decompose anaerobically, resulting in fairly undesirable methane. A shallower pile or one that is mixed well will result in mostly aerobic decomposition. The aerobic decomposition will produce CO2 but not huge amounts of it. Each hectare of land could absorb something like ~8 tons of CO2 per year; with 7 hectares, the CO2 emitted by composting 12t of oranges is going to be dwarfed by the new vegetation. After a few years when you're growing big trees, the rate of CO2 absorption might rise as high as 20-30t/year/hectare in costa rica's environment. And this is probably an underestimate, as the soil amendment of the orange peels seems to have stimulated faster regrowth than would have happened otherwise.

And perhaps more to the point: There isn't really a purely "no co2" way of disposing of organic matter other than perhaps burying it at the bottom of a deep mineshaft (but the co2 or methane will be produced anyway). Landfilling it is strictly worse - you still get the decomposition products, _or worse_ because you'll mostly get methane, but without producing useful soil byproducts.

Overall this project is a huge win on a carbon perspective and a waste reduction perspective.

mvdtnz• 4 months ago

It's not a reasonable question. What's the alternative for the orange peels? They were going to rot and release that CO2 whether they did it in a big pile here or somewhere else.

sfink• 4 months ago

CO2 is going to be neutral for the peels. You're just transporting it from where the oranges grew to where they were dumped. The CO2 benefit is purely from the trees and other biomass that grow where they wouldn't be growing before.

As for methane, that's a good question. Orange peels are better than most things because the limonene inhibits methane producing bacteria. But you'd still get quite a bit in the deeper piles (that produce the anaerobic conditions needed for methane production).

Spreading them out more would help, but might interfere with the beneficial effects.

rustystump• 4 months ago

I may be wrong but isnt most of the tree carbon capture over stated as in the overwhelming majority comes from algae in the oceans?

While forests are great they are not the best focus iirc compared to the oceans.

bcjdjsndon2• 4 months ago

The fuh? Oranges a climate risk? You've gone full 360 crazy there

mrtnmcc2• 4 months ago

Suppose this is the article to give that person who chides you for dropping an orange peel on a hike.

stronglikedan• 4 months ago

life's too short for friends like that

throwway120385• 4 months ago

It's apparently long enough for me to see the same orange peel in the same place over a year or two.

chunkymilk• 4 months ago

It depends on where the hike is: Dropping an orange peel in a humid, temperate, low-elevation place is vastly different than a desert, high-alpine, tundra or other environment where organics take a long time to decompose.

mrtnmcc2• 4 months ago

I'm mostly joking.. LNT is always the best policy, even if only (sometimes) for the feeling of pristineness.

Honestly orange peels are incredible, the smell, the robustness. It reminds me of the joke of the plastic cup at Whole Foods filled with orange slices. If only there was a natural packaging alternative...

Mistletoe• 4 months ago

Monty Don has said before that really the best and only thing you need for a great garden soil is regular addition of lots of compost. This is it on a very large scale. :)

mynegation• 4 months ago

They could not find the site and searched for it for years. A stark reminder that civilian use of GPS is relatively recent thing. The site was created in 1990s and GPS was opened for civilian use only in 1995 and gained equal accuracy by legislation in 2000.

zokier• 4 months ago

on the other hand, basic surveying is centuries old. if you lose square km patch of land, it is not due lack of technology even in the previous century.

exidy• 4 months ago

Even a sextant and decent watch should be able to get you to within a nautical mile or two.

rasz• 4 months ago

GPs was available for civilian use since 80s, just expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation_device#Hi...

jillesvangurp• 4 months ago

Turning degraded land back into fertile land is actually very feasible and not as hopeless as it may seem. A lot of the damage people have done to landscapes in recent centuries is still reversible. There are a lot of examples all over the world of people turning dried out and heavily eroded land back into fertile land with great bio diversity.

Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even just leaving it alone, and putting a stop to the practices that destroyed the land, (e.g. keeping the grazers out) sometimes is all that is needed. For example, a simple fence can allow vegetation to re-establish itself without getting destroyed by hungry deer, sheep, or whatever.

Once you have plants with deep roots, the land gets better at retaining water and soil stops eroding away. Once the land can retain water, a lot of life can make use of that. Nature tends to be resilient and adaptable. There are no one size fits all solutions for every landscape. But there are a lot of things that have been tried that have yielded good results.

In any case, stuff like this is not as surprising as it seems. Organic matter rots. That usually involves a lot of bacteria and insects. The result is basically compost. A giant heap of compost and a lot of wild seeds from neighboring grounds with a bit of water is one hell of a good way to kickstart nature. Probably the best decision was to leave it alone.

sophacles• 4 months ago

Often you don't even need seeds from neighboring land. The soil that remains often still has seeds sitting dormant waiting for conditions to return to healthy.

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

Reading this feels like a great metaphor to life that I am unable to explain but I will still try, in the sense that, within a degraded land with just the right conditions, it is just waiting to grow :D

65102• 4 months ago

It once struck me that it is unimaginative to assume this is their first planet.

fainpul• 4 months ago

As demonstrated in "The Biggest Little Farm" [1]. However it took years of hard work.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/

Rendello• 4 months ago

In that case, it also took a boatload of investor money, keeping on the previous farm staff, and endless volunteer labour by way of WWOOF [1]. Not that any of that's a bad thing, but the whole time I was watching it I was thinking did they really just start off by saying:

We sensed it was coming. The landlord called. Todd had to go. Moving to another apartment wouldn’t stop Todd’s barking. And then it hit us. Molly’s dream could be the answer to everything. We had a great idea with no way to pay for it. [...] it eventually connected us to some investors who actually saw this old way of farming as the future.

How did two city-slicker non-farmers manage to get investment for a large, fully-staffed farm? I imagine the fact that they'd been spending the last 20 years making documentaries had something to do with it, and surely they weren't going to end up with a film saying "we thought we could make our natural organic farm work, boy were we wrong!"

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140315055010/http://www.aprico...

pseudohadamard4• 4 months ago

Not even degraded land but just land where the natural soil is poor, for example when you're sitting on clay soil. On a smallish scale like your own property you can get in touch with arborists and get them to dump plant mulch in your driveway (often for free since they avoid the dumping fees), then spread it across the ground with some urea to help the bacteria break down the wood fibres. Within a year or two, you don't need to wait 16 years, you've got incredibly rich soil on the property, with the clay underneath acting as a long-term storage sponge for moisture.

mikkupikku2• 4 months ago

Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".

This is why we can't have nice things. Juice company makes compost? Sued! Ford wants to pay his workers a living wage? Sued! Nail lawyers to trees.

bennettnate5• 4 months ago

Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".

No good deed goes unpunished--wild that the competitor company successfully sued them.

adammarples• 4 months ago

Maybe they can now overturn that judgement

ComputerGuru• 4 months ago

There's actually no guarantee that if the "experiment" were allowed to continue that the results would have been as great. If the biomass accumulated faster than it could be broken down, we might not have seen the same result.

calf3• 4 months ago

Even a consequentialist should accept that it would have taken 16 years to realize it was actually a good thing to do with orange peels.

dessimus• 4 months ago

The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!

nvader• 4 months ago

I came here to say this, because this whole anecdote mildly infuriates me.

I don't necessarily blame TicoFruit for their actions. They might have some legitimate concerns about fairness, since their competitor is now able to dispose of peels much more economically.

But for the courts to stupidly go along with the injunction is what disappoints me. A much better result for everyone in Costa Rica would be if both manufacturers were allowed to dump at no cost.

contingencies3• 4 months ago

The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.

ssl-3• 4 months ago

Indeed. I've been doing that for a quite a number of years now.

I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.

And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.

It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.

Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.

(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)

mikkupikku2• 4 months ago

Ngl I didn't know there was another way to compost. The whole idea is to just throw vegetable waste into a pile and let it turn into dirt, isn't it?

hermitcrab3• 4 months ago

Rats and other undesirables can be attracted to compost. So it is probably best to use a composting bin, if you can.

Also try to mix in some brown/carbon (leaves, shredded paper, cardboard etc) with your green/nitrogen (food scraps, grass cuttings etc), otherwise it can become a stinky swamp (anerobic).

contingencies3• 4 months ago

It's possible to approach composting form a more simplistic standpoint. The listed issues are mostly specific to high density (eg. in a fixed bin) composting. If you spread it out these problems basically go away, and so do the stinky compost labor and purchasing requirements.

ajkjk• 4 months ago

Presumably the reason this article delays showing you the before/after photos is to get you to scroll and see more ads, since you'll probably just close the tab after. Which sucks, but, fine.

What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?

shrx• 4 months ago

I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone

Firefox + ublock origin + consent-o-matic saves the day for me.

jdlshore• 4 months ago

If you’re using Safari on iOS, the “hide distracting items” option accessible from the icon in the left of the URL bar works really well, and it remembers your choices for your next visit to the site.

FuriouslyAdrift• 4 months ago

The actul study linked to the project... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rec.12565

krisroadruck3• 4 months ago

Avid backyard gardener here. When we moved to our new house in Fort Wayne our yard was a real problem child. It was a new build in an old neighborhood. All the other houses where about 40ish years old. Ours had also had a 40 year old house, but at some point that house was abandoned, eventually condemned and then knocked down. Eventually a builder snapped up the lot and built our current house. But that means the ground had been stripped of topsoil and compacted all to hell not once, but 3 times in the past 40 years. What was left was dead heavily compacted clay subsoil. It had drainage issues in wet weather, it developed crazy deep & wide cracks in dry weather, and just generally didn't want to grow anything.

We solved it by dumping around 400 cubic yards of arborist woodchips spread 12-18 inches thick over most of the yard, then top dressed that with composted manure and worm castings. Finally, we planted a bunch of wine cap mushroom spawn (to break down the wood) and clover (to fix nitrogen and feed the fungi) over the whole thing. 3 years later we have rich loamy soil that drains well, is full of earth worms and grows anything we plant it it.

TL;DR: Add tons of carbon and nitrogen into degraded soil and the local fungi, bacteria and worms will turn that into good soil if given sufficient time.

eudamoniac3• 4 months ago

Not snark: did you actually improve the soil, or did you just add a bunch of good soil? How is the soil doing 2 or 3 feet down?

I'm currently improving my soil via a series of cover crops chosen to fix nitrogen and aerate soil, but it's yet to be seen how well it turns out.

krisroadruck3• 4 months ago

It's not a hard transition between the layer I added up top and the stuff below, so bioturbation is happening - but it's a slow process. I've helped it along a little with broad forking but it will take many more years to impact soil 3 feet below the surface. On the bright side, that matters to me not at all, because nothing I'm growing has a root zone that deep. 12-18 inches of improvement is plenty for gardening and overkill if you just want a lawn.

Keep in mind pure organic matter does not a soil make. It's the mix of that organic matter + the inorganic substrate. So I added a bunch of organic matter to turn the dead compacted inorganic substrate (degraded pewamo urban complex series clay subsoil in my case) into good soil. The organic matter + fungi help that heavy clay to stable macro aggregates which let the soil drain. The humus the organic matter turns into help regulate soil moisture in dry conditions and provides the right environment for all the soil microfauna need to do their thing. Essentially I restored the O & A horizons, and over time the B horizon will improve.

Cover cropping is great btw, but you might want to get a soil sample analyzed. We had less than half a percent of organic matter when we moved in. Really you want that up in the 5-8% territory. More towards the higher end if your soil is clay dominant like ours. Cover cropping alone wouldn't have gotten us to that number in my lifetime.

tbirdny• 4 months ago

I'm surprised they would just throw orange peels away. There are beneficial compounds in orange peels that can be extracted: limonene, hesperidin, naringin, pectin, insoluble and soluble fiber. Or, could be added to animal feed.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

I have 45acres of low-grade agricultural land, and if someone dropped 12k tons of compostable material on it, I'd be delighted.

Where do I sign up?

augusto-moura• 4 months ago

Not sure what is the biome of the land, but you can look for the work of Ernst Götsch[1] and Syntropic Farming [1].

The main idea is introducing biomass in layers and heavy pruning, start planting a lot of short-life plants (like grass) while also planting some medium-life plants (like bushes or small trees). Prune the grass on every seasonal cycle keeping the cut leafs on the ground. Repeat the cycle while also introducing long-life plants (like bigger trees, preferably fruit-bearing trees). Another idea is having plants that seek for water deep underground, those eventually bring streams and creaks back to life.

When you understand it, the plan sounds simple, you are just speeding up the natural cycles of the location, using grass to fix carbon and generate biomass while other trees grow in the vegetation. It is pretty impressive

Edit: added a better link explaining Synthropic Farming

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...

bluGill2• 4 months ago

Ask your county extention are dnr. Different states do this differently but most states have programs with experts who know what works in your area and what the options are.

12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

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