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.
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!"
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
nahīñ hai nā-umīd 'iqbāl' apnī kisht-e-vīrāñ se
zarā nam ho to ye miTTī bahut zarḳhez hai saaqi
Do not despair over barren fields.
The soil is so fertile; a little rain is enough.
(The entire Urdu poem which probably is comparable to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" is pretty good).
This is good, I found another one to express what I was feeling.
We are here, We are waiting.
- Optimus prime.
My interpretation is that everyone no matter how bad things look from outside has hope/seeds of hope which are just waiting for the right conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJszUl1EI4A (I also feel like, the ending of this movie/transformers was one of the best movies and the ending still gives me goosebumps in hope for future)
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.
> 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!
That's not the point, the point is nobody could know for certain at the time of decision making, so it is revisionism to frame dumping as a legitimate experiment. The outcomes do not justify the action made at the time given a reasonable analysis of ecological risks. The time order in which a rational decision is justifiable matters, unlike whatever the prior commenter was trying to suggest.
Did they forget? Or did they know this would happen before dumping the first peel and it simply wasn't worth the money it would take to prove it in the public record?
Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of money to produce a report that says that on the public record" and it was a nonstarter so the project just died and now 16yr later here we are.
From TFA it sounds like they had no idea, given how often they repeat how surprised they were at the outcome. So it sounds like an uncontrolled experiment, let's dump thousands of tons of food waste here and hope for the best.
Also, it's a sample size of one. There could be 20 other non-published stories where something similar was tried and it turned the place into a toxic wasteland. It's a great success story but I can see why people would be nervous with a food company dumping its waste next to a national park.
I suspect the people with a million orange peels to dump are also the people who are experts in exactly how the various parts of an orange degrade with time and that when the plan was concocted they did so knowing it would likely work but they didn't write it down and have since left. Basically the same as legacy code. You see this all the time in the physical world. "why did those morons choose X for Y". Well, 20yr ago the product served Z and at the time that industry cleaned their factories with some other chemical than what they use now and therefor X was the right choice.
People who know their industrial project will F-off and create a dump are the ones who go through the process, pay for the bullshit surveys and studies, get the permits and whatnot and document the whole thing fastidiously. Because those are the things you do to ensure that you are not the bag holder at the end of it all.
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.
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.
Yes, any landfill of any size is going to clean this up a bit and run it through a generator. They can get contracts from the utility to use so much power per week (whatever the tank capacity iso and since the utility controls when it is on (that is when other renewables are low) they get a higher price. The details are complex, but thus is very valuable green renewable (we can debate how green and renewable eslewhere) energy to a utility.
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.
There used to be a huge flare at a landfill near here but at some point they redirected it to energy generation, around 200-250kWe from gas that was just going to waste before then.
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.
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.
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.
Example: Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google HQ in Mountain View. Built on top of a landfill. For a while in the 80s, there were occasionally small fires during shows when people lit cigarettes. Google also harvested the methane and used it to power some stuff, although I can't find an authoritative article with details.
Several schools I know of have part of their playing fields on reclaimed land that's former landfill. You can't build on it because you have no idea what sort of gases and possibly toxins will work their way up from below, but wide open fields with free air movement that aren't round-the-clock occupied are fine. The only downside is that for an initial period you need to re-cap places with soil every few years as the fill underneath settles. There was one place where they'd paved over it rather than leaving it as soil to create tennis courts and after a few years it was a sort of dune landscape since they couldn't backfill the dips with soil. It was quite picturesque actually, a sort of post-apocalyptic look with miniature ponds with reeds growing in them and occasional visits from ducks. Sure, they'd lose a kid in one from time to time, but being a large school they didn't have a shortage of those.
when I first saw it in the 1990s it was kinda on the outs, like K-Mart was already failing (as a business) and the parking lot was visibly wavy because of subsidence. Funny the New York Pizzeria mentioned in that article is run by my relatives.
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).
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.
Well, a plasma torch -> energy system is basically a chemical factory attached to a plasma torch and the thing about a chemical factory is that quality inputs lead to quality outputs. Poor quality inputs lead to poor quality outputs or maybe something blowing up. Any kind of "circular economy" chemical factory has the problem that it has to run on whatever inputs are available that day and that kind of thing will have Chem-E's pulling their hair out.
If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
No. What's 'other vermin'? We have plenty of native animals. I see a few of them feeding in the area I distribute organic matter, including (non-snake) reptiles, turkeys, possums, butterflies, native bees, spiders, etc. Lots of fungi too.
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.
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.
I did get a soil test, but not for organic matter; I assume it's zero. My desert neighborhood has caliche under rocky sandy loam, but it also has a lot of very large old trees, so I'm hoping the caliche is permeable and not just that the original builders excavated huge holes. It's so rocky that a soil probe and broadfork is unusable, but as deep as I've tested (2 feet down) I've been able to still dig with a shovel.
This year, since I just moved in, I'm just doing a small 10x10ft testbed. I mixed in a few inches of compost manure, shallowly because the soil is so rocky. My plan is to do a biomass/nitrogen crop mix this spring, which is currently seeded, and then in fall do another similar mix along with deep rooted radish for decompaction. Then hopefully next spring I can plant real things. If I find that after a year of cover cropping the soil is still unusable, then I'll bring out the power tiller and pickaxe for the rest of the yard and get the amendments mixed in deeply. I've read a lot of permaculture books in the last year, and I'd like to garden in that way, but I'm certainly not against buying bulk amendments to get started.
12-18 isn't deep enough for me, since I am going to have large shrubs (need 3ft) and perhaps trees (need 5ft).
We are fighting entirely different battles. The main reason I'm focused on those 12-18 inches is drainage. Heavy clay will stay waterlogged for a really long time and basically drown plants. Once it gets really dry it goes hydrophobic and cracks. But down below the first foot or so, roots aren't breathing, they are just collecting nutrients - which clay tends to have in abundance.
If you are dealing mostly with sandy/rocky soil you've got drainage in abundance. It's possible you have a perched water table with the caliche - but if it's 2 feet of permeable substrate in a desert environment I don't think you are going to be dealing with enough water for it to matter, you'll just get lateral drainage. What you need a way to slow down infiltration, and also stop leaching since the cation exchange capacity of sand is hot garbage. Shade + organic matter is probably going to be your go-to tools. Unfortunately I don't think the free arborist chips solution I did will work for you - might be too arid for them to break down in a reasonable time frame. So it's either import it at cost, or plant and wait. Just boils down to your level of patience vs stomach for paying for "dirt" as it turns out good soil isn't actually "dirt cheap".
Something to consider - most of the no-till / permaculture folks admit that a one time tillage up front isn't that bad. The main issue with tillage is you are disrupting an ecosystem. The fungal networks, the worms, all the little critter infiltration tunnels. But that only matters when you aren't dealing with dead compact degraded soil. Right now there is nothing to disrupt, so if you can combine a one time deep tillage of organic matter, or maybe subsoiling to break up some of the caliche to whatever depth you want - now is the time to do it.
Yeah I'm totally fine with tilling at first, I was just trying to save money on renting a tiller.
Despite being sandy loam the drainage is really bad just a few inches down. I think the rocks are so densely packed together and in such great quantities that it's long to drain. I'm hoping the roots can get through and help this. If not, I'm going to have to rent a big tiller. One thing I've been doing that has obvious benefits is putting wet cardboard as mulch; the soil under the cardboard stays moist far longer. Unsightly, but definitely improving germination. I'll probably do this throughout the garden underneath landscaping rock since cardboard is essentially free.
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.
But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgive some naivety here absent demonstrated malice.
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?
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
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
As demonstrated in "The Biggest Little Farm" [1]. However it took years of hard work.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/
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...
Said farmers were family of the founder of a large HFT firm.
[dead]
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
> Reading this feels like a great metaphor
One of the more famous Urdu poem ends:
(The entire Urdu poem which probably is comparable to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" is pretty good).https://www.rekhta.org/couplets/nahiin-hai-naa-umiid-iqbaal-...
Life...finds a way.
This is good, I found another one to express what I was feeling.
We are here, We are waiting.
- Optimus prime.
My interpretation is that everyone no matter how bad things look from outside has hope/seeds of hope which are just waiting for the right conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJszUl1EI4A (I also feel like, the ending of this movie/transformers was one of the best movies and the ending still gives me goosebumps in hope for future)
It once struck me that it is unimaginative to assume this is their first planet.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
That's not the point, the point is nobody could know for certain at the time of decision making, so it is revisionism to frame dumping as a legitimate experiment. The outcomes do not justify the action made at the time given a reasonable analysis of ecological risks. The time order in which a rational decision is justifiable matters, unlike whatever the prior commenter was trying to suggest.
Did they forget? Or did they know this would happen before dumping the first peel and it simply wasn't worth the money it would take to prove it in the public record?
Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of money to produce a report that says that on the public record" and it was a nonstarter so the project just died and now 16yr later here we are.
From TFA it sounds like they had no idea, given how often they repeat how surprised they were at the outcome. So it sounds like an uncontrolled experiment, let's dump thousands of tons of food waste here and hope for the best.
Also, it's a sample size of one. There could be 20 other non-published stories where something similar was tried and it turned the place into a toxic wasteland. It's a great success story but I can see why people would be nervous with a food company dumping its waste next to a national park.
I suspect the people with a million orange peels to dump are also the people who are experts in exactly how the various parts of an orange degrade with time and that when the plan was concocted they did so knowing it would likely work but they didn't write it down and have since left. Basically the same as legacy code. You see this all the time in the physical world. "why did those morons choose X for Y". Well, 20yr ago the product served Z and at the time that industry cleaned their factories with some other chemical than what they use now and therefor X was the right choice.
People who know their industrial project will F-off and create a dump are the ones who go through the process, pay for the bullshit surveys and studies, get the permits and whatnot and document the whole thing fastidiously. Because those are the things you do to ensure that you are not the bag holder at the end of it all.
Maybe they can now overturn that judgement
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.
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.
https://planetliner.com/landfill-cap/
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
> Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn.
Can useful energy be recovered from this?
Yes, any landfill of any size is going to clean this up a bit and run it through a generator. They can get contracts from the utility to use so much power per week (whatever the tank capacity iso and since the utility controls when it is on (that is when other renewables are low) they get a higher price. The details are complex, but thus is very valuable green renewable (we can debate how green and renewable eslewhere) energy to a utility.
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.
There used to be a huge flare at a landfill near here but at some point they redirected it to energy generation, around 200-250kWe from gas that was just going to waste before then.
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.
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.
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.
People sometimes build stuff on top of landfills.
Example: Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google HQ in Mountain View. Built on top of a landfill. For a while in the 80s, there were occasionally small fires during shows when people lit cigarettes. Google also harvested the methane and used it to power some stuff, although I can't find an authoritative article with details.
Several schools I know of have part of their playing fields on reclaimed land that's former landfill. You can't build on it because you have no idea what sort of gases and possibly toxins will work their way up from below, but wide open fields with free air movement that aren't round-the-clock occupied are fine. The only downside is that for an initial period you need to re-cap places with soil every few years as the fill underneath settles. There was one place where they'd paved over it rather than leaving it as soil to create tennis courts and after a few years it was a sort of dune landscape since they couldn't backfill the dips with soil. It was quite picturesque actually, a sort of post-apocalyptic look with miniature ponds with reeds growing in them and occasional visits from ducks. Sure, they'd lose a kid in one from time to time, but being a large school they didn't have a shortage of those.
This shopping center was built on a landfill
https://www.wskg.org/regional-news/2025-08-08/binghamton-off...
when I first saw it in the 1990s it was kinda on the outs, like K-Mart was already failing (as a business) and the parking lot was visibly wavy because of subsidence. Funny the New York Pizzeria mentioned in that article is run by my relatives.
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).
Like ski courses!
Today’s landfills are already used for natural gas generation.
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
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.
Well, a plasma torch -> energy system is basically a chemical factory attached to a plasma torch and the thing about a chemical factory is that quality inputs lead to quality outputs. Poor quality inputs lead to poor quality outputs or maybe something blowing up. Any kind of "circular economy" chemical factory has the problem that it has to run on whatever inputs are available that day and that kind of thing will have Chem-E's pulling their hair out.
If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.
Apparently that same technology is being used on newer US Navy ships for waste management.
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.
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).
California has a low-double-digit percentage of the US population, and mandates organic waste separation/collection.
https://calrecycle.ca.gov/Organics/SLCP/collection/
For anthropologists and archaeologists, trash/sewage is gold.
Proud to report residential composting is now mandatory in NYC.
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
> most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC
Also a scam.
In what way?
Most municipalities collect recycling and then just landfill it: https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/.
I find it very difficult to imagine that composting is actually legit.
You can't just label a program like this "a scam" on the basis of ... your feelings? Intuition? Biases? In other contexts, that's libel.
It looks legit to me, based on a few minutes of web searching: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/compost-gi...
It's an inference from the evidence showing that municipal recycling programs are a scam: https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/qjbzxi/recyc...
It's doubtful that'll ever happen in Dutchess County but I can dream.
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.
Even a sextant and decent watch should be able to get you to within a nautical mile or two.
GPs was available for civilian use since 80s, just expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation_device#Hi...
> 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 also mentioned that invasive grass species were suppressed by the orange peels which likely contributed to native plants thriving better.
They should check for new penicillin strains in this forest.
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.
I wonder what fuelled the human infestation currently ravaging the Americas.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
Do you not have problems with rats and other vermin?
No. What's 'other vermin'? We have plenty of native animals. I see a few of them feeding in the area I distribute organic matter, including (non-snake) reptiles, turkeys, possums, butterflies, native bees, spiders, etc. Lots of fungi too.
>What's 'other vermin'?
Badgers, foxes, racoons etc. Depends where you live.
Probably should have used a better word than 'vermin'. It sounds overly judgemental.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I did get a soil test, but not for organic matter; I assume it's zero. My desert neighborhood has caliche under rocky sandy loam, but it also has a lot of very large old trees, so I'm hoping the caliche is permeable and not just that the original builders excavated huge holes. It's so rocky that a soil probe and broadfork is unusable, but as deep as I've tested (2 feet down) I've been able to still dig with a shovel.
This year, since I just moved in, I'm just doing a small 10x10ft testbed. I mixed in a few inches of compost manure, shallowly because the soil is so rocky. My plan is to do a biomass/nitrogen crop mix this spring, which is currently seeded, and then in fall do another similar mix along with deep rooted radish for decompaction. Then hopefully next spring I can plant real things. If I find that after a year of cover cropping the soil is still unusable, then I'll bring out the power tiller and pickaxe for the rest of the yard and get the amendments mixed in deeply. I've read a lot of permaculture books in the last year, and I'd like to garden in that way, but I'm certainly not against buying bulk amendments to get started.
12-18 isn't deep enough for me, since I am going to have large shrubs (need 3ft) and perhaps trees (need 5ft).
We are fighting entirely different battles. The main reason I'm focused on those 12-18 inches is drainage. Heavy clay will stay waterlogged for a really long time and basically drown plants. Once it gets really dry it goes hydrophobic and cracks. But down below the first foot or so, roots aren't breathing, they are just collecting nutrients - which clay tends to have in abundance.
If you are dealing mostly with sandy/rocky soil you've got drainage in abundance. It's possible you have a perched water table with the caliche - but if it's 2 feet of permeable substrate in a desert environment I don't think you are going to be dealing with enough water for it to matter, you'll just get lateral drainage. What you need a way to slow down infiltration, and also stop leaching since the cation exchange capacity of sand is hot garbage. Shade + organic matter is probably going to be your go-to tools. Unfortunately I don't think the free arborist chips solution I did will work for you - might be too arid for them to break down in a reasonable time frame. So it's either import it at cost, or plant and wait. Just boils down to your level of patience vs stomach for paying for "dirt" as it turns out good soil isn't actually "dirt cheap".
Something to consider - most of the no-till / permaculture folks admit that a one time tillage up front isn't that bad. The main issue with tillage is you are disrupting an ecosystem. The fungal networks, the worms, all the little critter infiltration tunnels. But that only matters when you aren't dealing with dead compact degraded soil. Right now there is nothing to disrupt, so if you can combine a one time deep tillage of organic matter, or maybe subsoiling to break up some of the caliche to whatever depth you want - now is the time to do it.
Yeah I'm totally fine with tilling at first, I was just trying to save money on renting a tiller.
Despite being sandy loam the drainage is really bad just a few inches down. I think the rocks are so densely packed together and in such great quantities that it's long to drain. I'm hoping the roots can get through and help this. If not, I'm going to have to rent a big tiller. One thing I've been doing that has obvious benefits is putting wet cardboard as mulch; the soil under the cardboard stays moist far longer. Unsightly, but definitely improving germination. I'll probably do this throughout the garden underneath landscaping rock since cardboard is essentially free.
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.
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.
Yes. A potential method of capture is to seed the ocean with more iron [1], to help the algae.
I assume that China will be the first to do these sorts of things, since the west will be too hogtied in regulations, lawsuits, and bureaucracy.
[1] https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/02/17/ocean-iron-fertilizat...
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.
In retrospect that was a rather stupid comment.
It's not like "the global north"/"the West" wasn't guilty of the enormous ecological damage _everywhere_ already.
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.
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.
The fuh? Oranges a climate risk? You've gone full 360 crazy there
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
(2) Composting (this approach) 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.
That's why I said if asked in good faith. :-)
But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgive some naivety here absent demonstrated malice.
*naivete
that word and I have never gotten along well. insert obligatory joke at my expense.
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.
It's the kind of question that I'd rather see answered by an ecologist than a judge!
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?
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?
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...
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.
> 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 actul study linked to the project... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rec.12565
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?
> I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone
Firefox + ublock origin + consent-o-matic saves the day for me.
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.
Previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=orange+peel
> 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.
> 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?
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
> 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".
Well they weren't allowed to do it for free - they had to give up some of their land which had value.
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.
it could have been corruption and something that turned out well in the end
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.
My guess is that Del Oro would have a competitive advantage in its waste disposal costs.
I guess tico fruit is just an asshole. Being sued is usually bad. If you can sue your competitor even better.
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. :)
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Suppose this is the article to give that person who chides you for dropping an orange peel on a hike.
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...
life's too short for friends like that
It's apparently long enough for me to see the same orange peel in the same place over a year or two.
Why dump the peel when you can use the entire orange to make that nasty orange British drink.