A juice company dumped orange peels in a national park.

August 25, 2017 3:34 AM

Twenty years ago two ecologists approached an orange juice company in Costa Rica with a proposition. The company would donate a portion of unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste — a nature preserve in the northwest — and in exchange the park would allow them to dump a year's worth of peel and pulp waste, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby. Here's what it looks like now. (via Upworthy) Spoiler: it looks good.
posted by valetta (39 comments total)

That was really cool.
posted by biggreenplant at 4:05 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

I just hope that hikers don't take this as permission to toss their "biodegradable" orange peels along the side of the trail.
posted by fairmettle at 4:10 AM on August 25, 2017 [7 favorites]

Twenty years at a frame per day makes about five minutes of video. A timelapse I would dearly love to see.
posted by Devonian at 4:25 AM on August 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

This was unusually content-free, even for an upworthy video
posted by backlikeclap at 4:53 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

On the other hand, it is nice to see something so...orange...do something that good for a change.
posted by briank at 5:00 AM on August 25, 2017 [15 favorites]

This news article from Princeton mentions that the dumping stopped because a rival company sued, alleging that the natural park was being defiled.

Journal article (free abstract + paywall).
posted by exogenous at 5:02 AM on August 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

Why is this surprising? Every gardener knows the value of compost.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 5:16 AM on August 25, 2017 [10 favorites]

was expecting more orange trees
posted by ryanrs at 5:27 AM on August 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

Compost is powerful.
posted by doctornemo at 5:54 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

fairmettle, aren't orange peels biodegradable?
posted by doctornemo at 5:55 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

fairmettle, aren't orange peels biodegradable?

Where I live it is so crowded that even biodegradable food waste isn't allowed to be discarded on the ground in parks or near hiking trails. Too many people around and no one wants to hike through a compost heap.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:16 AM on August 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

Where I live it is so crowded that even biodegradable food waste isn't allowed to be discarded on the ground in parks or near hiking trails. Too many people around and no one wants to hike through a compost heap.

So they degrade the curb a-peel of the park?



I shall go now.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:18 AM on August 25, 2017 [22 favorites]

Orange peels and banana skins take about two years to fully decompose.
posted by Slothrup at 6:20 AM on August 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Relatedly, one of the ways you can often spot areas where municipalities spread their treated sewage sludge is by all of the tomato plants, since tomato seeds can survive many sewage treatment processes.

It shouldn't be a surprise that adding a bunch of biomass to depleted soil is going to produce luxuriant growth later. There are much more complex questions about where this is a straightforwardly good idea, and where it might have less welcome consequences, but the more general point that many of the things we treat as waste and put in landfills can actually have uses if approached with some thought and care.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:22 AM on August 25, 2017 [14 favorites]

I'm mildly surprised that this worked. Yes, compost, but in counter to that citrus peels have a lot of d-limonene in them, which is used as a mild pesticide. Now I'm wondering if the luxuriant growth is "in spite of" or partly "because of" the stuff.
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:42 AM on August 25, 2017 [6 favorites]

Yeah, every compost primer I've ever read has warned people not to include citrus peels. But I guess d-limonene is temporary, and additional carbon is permanent?
posted by joyceanmachine at 6:47 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

metafilter: a dog-sized weasel
posted by blue_beetle at 7:02 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Janzen (previously on MeFi) is a demigod.
posted by dhruva at 7:12 AM on August 25, 2017

It still bothers me that we don't have a "compost" option for recycling/trash pickup. It's just "trash", "paper", "plastic", and sometimes "metal". Our household composts but it's never an option at the municipal level, so restaurants and public venues don't. The earth at landfills is contaminated, so it can't be used to grow things even after it's not a landfill anymore.
posted by domo at 7:16 AM on August 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

Orange peels and banana skins take about two years to fully decompose.

Exactly why this approach will fail in the world of corporate quarterly profit growth requirements. The plot of land was probably not just stinky and gross for 2-3 years but in a "first world" country would be registered as a toxic waste site with all the accompanying lawsuits that require that all material be removed and bagged for storage in hermetically sealed warehouses.
posted by sammyo at 7:16 AM on August 25, 2017

Could it be that the D-limonene pesticide effect was actually beneficial?

Like, it killed off the bugs that might otherwise have disrupted some of the plants being established and then faded away by the time the new plants needed bugs?
Or is that silly?
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:30 AM on August 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

It still bothers me that we don't have a "compost" option for recycling/trash pickup. It's just "trash", "paper", "plastic", and sometimes "metal". Our household composts but it's never an option at the municipal level,

Lots of places have municipal composting. Toronto has had it for over a decade. Heck, it's even coming to our suburban California city later this year.
posted by GuyZero at 7:52 AM on August 25, 2017 [7 favorites]

My understanding was food scraps left by hikers (of any type) it messes with the ecology of the area, supporting a higher population of rats and racoons or whatever other things that eat scraps than "should" be there.

Unsightly too but you still shouldn't dump your orange peels them even if they're not near the trail.
posted by mark k at 7:53 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Sort of related, in that it involves reusing orange rinds, this popped up on the BBC website yesterday - How Sicilian oranges are being made into clothes and also into flour.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:19 AM on August 25, 2017 [5 favorites]

Yeah, every compost primer I've ever read has warned people not to include citrus peels.

I was worried about this because I've been throwing limes and lemons in my compost for years, but Google seems to confirm that this is just based on vermicompost, where worms don't like too much citrus. I haven't seen any issues with lemons/limes in my compost, the only thing I keep out of there is avocado pits because those never break down.
posted by Gortuk at 8:38 AM on August 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Hey! I was working with Janzen on a different project in Santa Rosa the summer that Jon Choi started on this. I helped take a couple of these measurements! So proud to see Tim's and Jon's (and Dan's and Winnie's) work coming out and getting attention!

the dumping stopped because a rival company sued, alleging that the natural park was being defiled

For a long time this felt like a case study in good innovative conservation ideas getting completely squashed by local politics. But now it's so rewarding to see Janzen's crazy idea validated as a good one for the park. One of Dan's big crusades has been convincing people that degraded wilderness is not worth giving up on. Over the last thirty years, he has restored so many acres of pastureland into healthy dry forest in Santa Rosa that he decided to keep burning one plot of land every year just to show young people what the area used to look like. ("That plot," he said to me, "Is worth a hundred scientific papers.")
posted by little onion at 8:55 AM on August 25, 2017 [24 favorites]

I just hope that hikers don't take this as permission to toss their "biodegradable" orange peels along the side of the trail.

Here in the desert, orange peels can last a really, really long time. Dog and cow shit, too.

I was backpacking the Colorado Trail last month, and was thumbing a ride at a trailhead when a woman pulled into the lot and began throwing her trash into the woods along the parking area. I told her she shouldn't do that and she got all "It's biodegradable, asshole" on me. And granted, we were in the mountains, so sure.

I said, look, there's half a dozen campsites in that area, and garbage attracts bears. "There aren't any bears here" she says to the guy who is carrying bear spray, and food in a required bear proof container, standing 15 feet from a "be bear aware" sign that says "no garbage facilities here. Take it with you - garbage cans attract bears".

I picked up most of it and threw it away in town.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 8:58 AM on August 25, 2017 [9 favorites]

It still bothers me that we don't have a "compost" option for recycling/trash pickup. It's just "trash", "paper", "plastic", and sometimes "metal".

New York has a collection program for this too - you can even include meat and leftovers, etc - things that you can't put in a home compost bin.
posted by valeries at 10:00 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

"the only thing I keep out of there is avocado pits because those never break down."

Well, sure, without a giant ground sloth to macerate it, digest it, and poop it out, you're in trouble.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:03 AM on August 25, 2017 [8 favorites]

"the only thing I keep out of there is avocado pits because those never break down."

Or, if you're like my ex and don't care, you might end up with an avocado tree growing in your compost pile. There are worse, or, at least, less tasty outcomes.
posted by thegears at 11:13 AM on August 25, 2017 [6 favorites]

The agricultural sector is pretty innovative, in dealing with issues like this.

When I was in college, I had a part time job at a small trucking company that existed for one purpose, only: to service a contract to remove the massive quantities of sparged grain from a major brewery, and transport it to local dairy farms where it was used as feed, since it contained up to 20% protein.
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 11:15 AM on August 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

I believe the advice from Worms Eat My Garbage was to not add huge amounts of citrus to the worm compost, but a little is fine. I often eat an orange a day in winter, and many bananas all year long, and from years of experience I can say that orange and banana peels disappear within about a month. I think that the fibrous stem part of the banana does linger forever though. In contrast, if you were to throw them on the ground in a dry climate, I'm sure they would last for years.
posted by polecat at 1:16 PM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

If the other orange juice company hadn't sued, there might not be a forest today. It seems like the magic formula was 12 000 tons of orange peels + 16 years for the land to lay fallow. If they kept dumping peels there it might have suffocated any new growth.

Something that really interests me is the biodiversity of the regenerated forest. Nobody planted those trees, so they must have planted themselves with the help of wind and birds, or the seeds were already there in the ground, left over from when the area was originally forested. It's kind of magical to think of all that potential life buried in the soil, waiting for the right conditions to grow. The orange peels provided those conditions.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:04 PM on August 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

you might end up with an avocado tree growing in your compost pile
Back when I lived in the south I had a few volunteer avocados and one papaya grow from the compost. They all froze eventually though. The one thing that survived was a date palm. It was a good ten feet tall and very prickly when I moved away.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:30 PM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

The agricultural sector is pretty innovative, in dealing with issues like this.

Particularly, livestock are big consumers of agroindustrial byproducts. Citrus pulp (the usual name of the mixture of peels and pulp resulting from juice production) is often dried and pelleted, and then traded worldwide ($185/t), mostly as a cattle feed since it's too fibrous for pigs and poultry. It's a good source of energy, often used as an alternative to cereal grains due to its high sugar content. It's sold in dried form because citrus pulp is 80-90% water and 25% of its dry matter is soluble sugars, so it ferments quickly and becomes a fly heaven. Fresh pulp is also bulky, so long-distance shipping is not very practical. Of course, drying is only economical when citrus pulp sells at a good price, so citrus pulp also ends up in landfill (self-link for more information).

If they kept dumping peels there it might have suffocated any new growth.

Yes, that was a one-time event. Usually, dumping large quantities of fresh, easily fermentescible biomass on the ground is not a good idea, as the resulting slurry is likely to contaminate the aquifers.
posted by elgilito at 5:33 PM on August 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

Nobody planted those trees, so they must have planted themselves with the help of wind and birds

One strategy that I know was used elsewhere in the ACG was planting shade trees early so that bird and mammal seed dispersers would come hang out and drop seedy poops onto the ground thus bringing a great diversity of plants.
posted by little onion at 8:09 PM on August 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

What I don't understand about this story is why the forest is so lush only on one side of the access road. If birds, animals and insects were helping to break down and move some of this material around, surely they didn't confine themselves to just that side of the road. I can grasp that there wouldn't be as much new growth in the areas that didn't get the dumped peels, but I would have expected more ... collateral growth, if you will.

As for things that don't grow native in our area, I usually keep those out of our home compost pile, and instead throw them in the trash collector's green bin, in order to not further disrupt our local microorganisms more than they already are.
posted by vignettist at 11:21 PM on August 25, 2017

Or you can use the cellulose from the peels to make rayon fiber.
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:20 AM on August 26, 2017

I've been nursing something of an obsession with tayra for several months now--I have pretty good reason to believe that they are one of the major predators of the singing mice across their range--and spotting a mention of one in that article just about made my damn day. Totally tangential and off topic, but they're weird, very bright little things, and I love them.

(They are actually one of the only known animals to deliberately think ahead when caching--they'll steal green plantains off trees, cache them, and only return later to consume them when ripe. Fucking amazing critters. I am dying to make it to a zoo that has one or two and get to observe some for an afternoon at some point.)
posted by sciatrix at 9:39 AM on August 26, 2017 [5 favorites]