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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
At some sites, the methane is burned in gas engine to generate electricity. Some sites build a CHP and resales the heat for district heating. The engines may need more maintenance due to silicate in the gas.
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
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, sometimes big things. The landfill we used when I was growing up is now beneath a Home Depot, which was built over the top of it almost 25 years ago. The landfill in this case was unlined, too.
Yup. It is a little undesirable for various reasons, and not every landfill is suitable for construction on top (seismics, sealing/capping technique, materials, etc).
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).
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
China could definitely do this, to offset the minuscule of the destruction they do with the dark fishing fleets around (and possibly in) protected marine areas.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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).
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.)
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?
> 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?
> 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
> 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!"
I'm also disappointed by the decision, but I get the argument made from the business perspective. I'm required to dispose my waste properly and its reflected in my prices, my competitor is not doing these practices and they should be compelled to follow the same regulations. I'm just disappointed that their court sided with the business since a better resolution would've been "your company can do this too if you just do the legwork".
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.
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.
It doesn't make sense if you were forced to implement waste management because you did it poorly to start with and your competitor found a smart way to do it for cheap.
> 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.
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. :)
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.
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...