
Better management of discarded produce could help forests regrow - moritzplassnig
http://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels-in-a-national-park-heres-what-it-looks-like-now
======
jonchang
The original paper is here: [https://sci-
hub.cc/10.1111/rec.12565](https://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/rec.12565)

The original site was heavily degraded and was host to mostly a single species
of invasive grass, introduced by ranchers for pasture. This invasive grass
presumably was preventing native shrubs and other woody plants from re-
establishing. The fruit company was permitted to dump 1000 truckloads of
orange peels over 3 hectares (30,000 square meters) in exchange for donating
1,600 hectares of primary forest.

What's interesting is that the authors hypothesize that the acidity of the
orange peels actually altered the soil pH enough to kill off all of the
invasive grasses and allowed the native plants to reestablish themselves.
Unfortunately the authors don't test this hypothesis directly, and the
intertwined effects of {acidity, asphyxiation of invasive grasses by several
tons of material, massive additional organic nutrient input} can't be teased
out due to the experimental design. Though with effects like this, I'm sure
restoration ecologists would be happy to receive 1600 Ha of old-growth forest
in exchange for dumping rights on 3 Ha of disturbed pasture land, even if they
don't know the exact mechanism.

~~~
kevmo
Another possibility is that the soil was so degraded that only crummy grass
could grow there. Perhaps the larger native plants, which are more complex
organisms, need nutrients in greater quantities than the grass. So it's less
about beating back the invasive grass and more about establishing necessary
conditions for native growth. These more complex organisms then create shade
canopy that other native species can thrive in (and which is bad for grass).

This is an extrapolation of my my experiences with composting. A greater
number of plants can grow in rich soil, period.

~~~
jonchang
Yes, this is what I was referring to when I mentioned "massive additional
organic nutrient input". Unfortunately the authors experiment design isn't
sufficient to show that this is the case since again there are other factors
at play. But it's certainly a possibility.

~~~
kevmo
Indeed.

The soil pH, while important in and of itself, seems like a bit of a red
herring (or maybe a secondary story) when evaluating the macro-changes.

------
ValleyOfTheMtns
Tangentially, if you want to reduce the waste that goes to landfill at your
home, compost.

One of the best ways of composting that I know is bokashi. It works by a
fermentation process. The biggest advantage of it is that you can put any
organic matter into it, except maybe bones. Yes, you can even put meat, dairy,
rice, pasta etc. in addition to fruit and vegetable matter. Once the bucket is
full, let it ferment for a week, drain the liquid once a day, and then bury
it. The fermenting for a week means that it breaks down much quicker in the
ground. This means that all that waste becomes usable and useful to the
bacteria and plants in the soil much much quicker than if you were to compost
it the traditional way. It's a difference of weeks vs. months.

One of the biggest concerns is smell, but honestly it isn't so bad. Because it
works by a fermentation process you need to keep the environment anaerobic
i.e. lacking oxygen. That means keeping the bokashi bucket sealed most of the
time, so you only need to smell it when you open the bucket to put your waste
in once a day. Besides, the smell itself is as bad as you might expect. It's
like a strong pickled smell, reminiscent of vinegar.

Also, the liquid that you drain can be used as a fertiliser. You just need to
dilute it 1:100, and pore it at the base of the plants when watering.

~~~
wil421
Sources or directions? Highly interested in doing this. I have a decent garden
going and I've been looking at options for composting.

~~~
wavefunction
It's a little corny but Austin Energy put out a youtube video with a good
broad overview of composting. You'll have to ignore the Austin-specific
content like the $75 rebate Austin Energy offers to subscribers that purchase
a qualified composter:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFMxFtsjfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFMxFtsjfs)

Austin also offers in some parts of town curbside composting and we have a
non-profit that also offers a compost pickup service. Those aren't likely to
appeal to a gardener though.

I purchased a Yimby spin-composter which has worked great for composting
organic material:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvuWJWW4ZLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvuWJWW4ZLw)

The assembly is a bit involved though, because you have to screw together all
of the panels in the tumbler and the ends and the stand and the hardware. Just
a head's up, lots of tedious screwing of the parts together but it is very
sturdy.

------
roflchoppa
At my buddies old house in Saratoga Ca, the soil in the backyard was super
dry. What we ended up doing is just composting all the greens out back;
watermelon shells, cantaloupe, onions, really just anything non-meat. To
agitate the process we just went out with a shovel and stabbed the section out
to make the compost smaller. By the time he sold the place the soil was super
healthy.

------
mjsweet
Here is an article about this posted on Princetons news site (August 22nd):

[https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-
green-h...](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-
orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest)

It cites an interesting court case by a rival company that occurred after the
contact to dump was signed:

"But a year after the contract was signed — during which time 12,000 metric
tons of orange peels were unloaded onto the degraded land — TicoFruit, a rival
company, sued, arguing the company had “defiled a national park.” The rival
company won the case in front of Costa Rica’s Supreme Court, and the orange-
peel-covered land was largely overlooked for the next 15 years."

------
cwkoss
The fact that this story of "dumped organic material composts and increases
fertility" has gained so much reach really shows how disconnected we all are
from nature.

Maybe the way for science to speak to the masses is to just pretend that every
confirmation study is a brand new piece of science. "New study finds that
reduced caloric intake causes weight loss!"

~~~
jonchang
If you read the original study there's a bit more going on than how the
article portrays it. In particular, this site was host to invasive grasses,
and after the orange peel input the site was flourishing with native species.
Simply introducing nutrients into a system isn't guaranteed to get rid of the
invasive species, and in fact it might make the problem even worse, so the
fact that this happened is quite interesting and there's probably some
interaction between the soil properties, decomposers, and orange peels that
made this particularly good outcome possible. See also my top-level comment
for my original take on it.

~~~
micheljones
Acidity of the peels affected the acidity of the soil.

~~~
jonchang
This is what the authors hypothesized in the paper. They don't test it though
so the causal link between orange peel acidity and forest restoration has not
been established.

~~~
micheljones
I'm not trying to state that as a fact. Just that the acidity was affected.
Which could have affected the restoration in different ways, most likely by
effects of plant affinity for soil acidity.

But I think that the main factor is simply the increase in biological matter.

------
rjurney
This mirrors my experiencing gardening in Georgia. We have about half an inch
of topsoil there, and below that is pure red clay with close to zero organic
matter in it. If you want to have a garden, you add compost. I added a couple
thousand pounds of well composted manure, and double tilled it to mix it in
down to a couple of feet. The result was that I had loamy soil that grew
vegetables like nobody's business.

Put enough compost on a plot and it will turn into a jungle, just like my
garden did after I stopped tending it. I was afraid to go in there to pick
tomatoes.

~~~
vram22
>Put enough compost on a plot and it will turn into a jungle, just like my
garden did after I stopped tending it. I was afraid to go in there to pick
tomatoes.

Why? Snakes maybe?

------
rmason
The orange peels contributed two things for certain, a large amount of
nutrients and organic matter that would hold and trap moisture. Both of those
are very conducive to high plant growth.

I do wish they had ph tested the soil before so we could know whether the
orange peels altered the soils acidity.

~~~
seunosewa
The acids in orange peels are organic; they would have been consumed by soil
microbes as a carbon source pretty quickly.

~~~
hinkley
Burying the weeds under an impenetrable layer of mulch causes them to compost
in place. The soil deepens and you get a blank slate to start over, more like
a secondary succession forest.

------
trapperkeeper74
Forests aren't always a panacea. Sure, rainforests mutually support others in
similar tropic and subtropical bands with rainfall patterns, but in the
melting tundra forests of Russia, there is an effort to deforest permafrost to
keep it from melting using large herds of animals like bison or reindeer to
kill the trees because plains are less insulated in winter than forests.
Without restoration of tundra back to plains, it's likely larger swaths of
land will melt and collapse into a moonscape.

~~~
andai
Could you share any links on this? Sounds interesting.

~~~
brohee
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleisto...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-
park/517779/) talks about it at length, even if it's not the main subject.

------
jvolkman
From the title I was expecting something criminal.

~~~
adjkant
As far as click bait goes, this is exactly like I want to see. It inspires
curiosity in a way that doesn't feel predatory. I didn't feel robbed or
deceived when it wasn't criminal, and the title was truthful to exactly what
the article was.

~~~
tom_mellior
I do think "here's what it looks like now" is more predatory than either "it
regrew beautifully" or "it is now a desert wasteland". Either of those would
have made me more willing to click. More information in the title does not
detract from clicks to _interesting_ articles. Only useless junk needs
clickbait titles for the clicks.

------
HillaryBriss
more generally, densely planted trees can use a wide variety of biomass
sources for compost: [https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-
real...](https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-really-
fast-d27df202ba09)

------
LarryMade2
Wonder if this would be good for where major wildfires have been such as the
Lake and Butte fires in California in 2015 - the places where it burned
strongest consumed all organic matter in the soil...

------
seattle_spring
Ugh. The result of this may be good, but please don't let this be an excuse to
dump your organic waste on trails instead of packing it out.

~~~
lsllc
Ok, I'll bite. So is it better for organic waste to rot in a plastic bag in a
landfill? or be left outside where it can rot down & degrade. Isn't it better
to pitch your apple cores, food & bio-waste etc. into the woods? Surely the
only things to pack out would be non-biodegradeable stuff; packaging etc.

Every time I run trails, I see little blue or black poop bags left all over by
dog owners (they never ever come back to pick them up!). Somehow I feel like
it would be better if they just let their dogs crap in the woods as nature
intended (not on the trails, but it can be flicked into the brush) so I don't
have to look at the poop bags.

~~~
bastawhiz
Throwing things that could be eaten by wild animals near trails or roads could
draw animals closer to humans, having some unfortunate unintentional
consequences.

~~~
lsllc
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating tossing food trash in the woods, but
what's the difference between someones mostly eaten sandwich and an expired
squirrel? or apples dropping from the apple tree (which they are doing right
now!).

Isn't that what wild animals do? scavengers will scavenge?

(again, to be clear, this is not feeding the "Yellowstone bears" from the car
window in the 60s, this is bits & pieces of scraps of food or bio-waste here
and there in the woods).

Are we not part of nature?

~~~
andai
Beehive = Nature

Anthill = Nature

City = Somehow magically separate from nature

I think it was originally because of God, and now it's just inertia.

------
foxhop
Its all about proper management of inputs and outputs. The best part is, it
doesn't take much to use a raw input like food scrapes, you literally just
toss them on a pile.

Grass clippings, Leaves, and other yard waste are the biggest input we humans
like to truck around aimlessly. Chop and drop in a semi organized way, and you
too can grow a forest.

#permaculture

------
sova
Grow food closer to face

------
vapemaster
this is a ridiculous title.

------
pvg
Maybe there's a better source for this somewhere than 'blogspam copy of a
clickbait site'.

~~~
verroq
It's a copy paste of

[https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-
peels...](https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels-in-a-
national-park-heres-what-it-looks-like-now?c=ufb1)

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll change the URL to that god help us from [http://www.the-daily-
llama.com/2017/08/23/a-juice-company-du...](http://www.the-daily-
llama.com/2017/08/23/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels-in-a-national-park-
heres-what-it-looks-like-now/).

For revenge, and to follow
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html),
we've changed the title to the most boringly representative phrase from the
article.

~~~
pls2halp
I feel like the original paper, as linked further up, might do a better job at
allowing you to not have to link to Upworthy.

------
notadoc
Alternate headline: A web click farm discovers composting

------
pcunite
I wonder what would happen if a bunch of candy bars were dumped?

