National Park Transformed by Tons of Orange Peel
- Editor OGN Daily
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
12,000 tons of food waste and 21 years later, this forest looks totally different.
In 1997, ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs approached an orange juice company in Costa Rica with an off-the-wall idea. In exchange for donating a portion of unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste - a nature preserve in the country's northwest - the park would allow the company to dump its discarded orange peels and pulp, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby.
One year later, one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot. The site was left untouched and largely unexamined for over a decade.
16 years later, Janzen dispatched graduate student Timothy Treuer to look for the site where the food waste was dumped. He couldn't find it. Eventually, with better directions, he realised he was in the right place and, compared to the adjacent barren former pastureland, the site of the food waste deposit was "like night and day."
"It was just hard to believe that the only difference between the two areas was a bunch of orange peels. They look like completely different ecosystems," he explains.
Treuer and a team of researchers from Princeton University studied the site over the course of the following three years. The results, published in the journal Restoration Ecology, highlight just how completely the discarded fruit parts assisted the area's turnaround.
The ecologists measured various qualities of the site against an area of former pastureland immediately across the access road used to dump the orange peels two decades prior. Compared to the adjacent plot, which was dominated by a single species of tree, the site of the orange peel deposit featured two dozen species of vegetation. In addition to the greater biodiversity, the soil was richer and the new forest had a better-developed canopy.
In a different study, published in Nature, researchers found that such forests absorb and store atmospheric carbon at roughly 11 times the rate of old-growth forests. So, the team's success with orange waste - which chimes with a similar test with discarded coffee pulp where it turbo-charged forest growth - could be an important tool in giving nature a helping hand.
In many parts of the world, rates of deforestation are increasing dramatically, sapping local soil of much-needed nutrients and, with them, the ability of ecosystems to restore themselves. Meanwhile, much of the world is awash in nutrient-rich food waste. In the United States, up to half of all produce in the United States is discarded. Most currently ends up in landfills.
"We don't want companies to go out there will-nilly just dumping their waste all over the place, but if it's scientifically driven and restorationists are involved in addition to companies, this is something I think has really high potential," Treuer says.
Coffee Pulp Super-Charges Forest Growth: Extraordinary new study shows the positive impact on regrowing deforested areas. The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years, with an 80 percent canopy cover, compared to just 20 percent of the control area. This allowed for four times more rapid growth and reinvigorated biological activity in the area.