Turning degraded land back into fertile land is actually very feasible and not as hopeless as it may seem. A lot of the damage people have done to landscapes in recent centuries is still reversible. There are a lot of examples all over the world of people turning dried out and heavily eroded land back into fertile land with great bio diversity.
Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even just leaving it alone, and putting a stop to the practices that destroyed the land, (e.g. keeping the grazers out) sometimes is all that is needed. For example, a simple fence can allow vegetation to re-establish itself without getting destroyed by hungry deer, sheep, or whatever.
Once you have plants with deep roots, the land gets better at retaining water and soil stops eroding away. Once the land can retain water, a lot of life can make use of that. Nature tends to be resilient and adaptable. There are no one size fits all solutions for every landscape. But there are a lot of things that have been tried that have yielded good results.
In any case, stuff like this is not as surprising as it seems. Organic matter rots. That usually involves a lot of bacteria and insects. The result is basically compost. A giant heap of compost and a lot of wild seeds from neighboring grounds with a bit of water is one hell of a good way to kickstart nature. Probably the best decision was to leave it alone.
Often you don't even need seeds from neighboring land. The soil that remains often still has seeds sitting dormant waiting for conditions to return to healthy.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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).
These machines are currently too expensive for widespread adoption, but I love the electric composter I bought that I keep in my garage.
There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.
I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
We now understand that fungus plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem. And given how easily fruit and vegetables rot and get moldy, the orange peel mass sounds like the perfect layer for the fungus to thrive in. The dead earth received a live giving blanket yielding healthy soil vegetation can thrive in.
They could not find the site and searched for it for years. A stark reminder that civilian use of GPS is relatively recent thing. The site was created in 1990s and GPS was opened for civilian use only in 1995 and gained equal accuracy by legislation in 2000.
on the other hand, basic surveying is centuries old. if you lose square km patch of land, it is not due lack of technology even in the previous century.
Not sure what is the biome of the land, but you can look for the work of Ernst Götsch[1] and Syntropic Farming [1].
The main idea is introducing biomass in layers and heavy pruning, start planting a lot of short-life plants (like grass) while also planting some medium-life plants (like bushes or small trees). Prune the grass on every seasonal cycle keeping the cut leafs on the ground. Repeat the cycle while also introducing long-life plants (like bigger trees, preferably fruit-bearing trees). Another idea is having plants that seek for water deep underground, those eventually bring streams and creaks back to life.
When you understand it, the plan sounds simple, you are just speeding up the natural cycles of the location, using grass to fix carbon and generate biomass while other trees grow in the vegetation. It is pretty impressive
Edit: added a better link explaining Synthropic Farming
One risk here is that a giant pile of biomass could allow nefarious critters to grow disproportionately. For example, in Alaska, they had giant brush piles that ended up fueling beetle infestations across the state.
Avid backyard gardener here. When we moved to our new house in Fort Wayne our yard was a real problem child. It was a new build in an old neighborhood. All the other houses where about 40ish years old. Ours had also had a 40 year old house, but at some point that house was abandoned, eventually condemned and then knocked down. Eventually a builder snapped up the lot and built our current house. But that means the ground had been stripped of topsoil and compacted all to hell not once, but 3 times in the past 40 years. What was left was dead heavily compacted clay subsoil. It had drainage issues in wet weather, it developed crazy deep & wide cracks in dry weather, and just generally didn't want to grow anything.
We solved it by dumping around 400 cubic yards of arborist woodchips spread 12-18 inches thick over most of the yard, then top dressed that with composted manure and worm castings. Finally, we planted a bunch of wine cap mushroom spawn (to break down the wood) and clover (to fix nitrogen and feed the fungi) over the whole thing. 3 years later we have rich loamy soil that drains well, is full of earth worms and grows anything we plant it it.
TL;DR: Add tons of carbon and nitrogen into degraded soil and the local fungi, bacteria and worms will turn that into good soil if given sufficient time.
I'm surprised they would just throw orange peels away. There are beneficial compounds in orange peels that can be extracted: limonene, hesperidin, naringin, pectin, insoluble and soluble fiber. Or, could be added to animal feed.
Presumably the reason this article delays showing you the before/after photos is to get you to scroll and see more ads, since you'll probably just close the tab after. Which sucks, but, fine.
What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?
If you’re using Safari on iOS, the “hide distracting items” option accessible from the icon in the left of the URL bar works really well, and it remembers your choices for your next visit to the site.
Does orange peel not produce any CO2 / methane when left like this? I'm assuming there is some negative carbon footprint before this becomes a positive?
The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.
The article does say
> Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.
How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.
CO2 is going to be neutral for the peels. You're just transporting it from where the oranges grew to where they were dumped. The CO2 benefit is purely from the trees and other biomass that grow where they wouldn't be growing before.
As for methane, that's a good question. Orange peels are better than most things because the limonene inhibits methane producing bacteria. But you'd still get quite a bit in the deeper piles (that produce the anaerobic conditions needed for methane production).
Spreading them out more would help, but might interfere with the beneficial effects.
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.
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.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
Another data point to the thesis that it's not the earth that needs saving, it's human systems. If disruption becomes the order of the day, who's impacted the worst?
The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.
Rats and other undesirables can be attracted to compost. So it is probably best to use a composting bin, if you can.
Also try to mix in some brown/carbon (leaves, shredded paper, cardboard etc) with your green/nitrogen (food scraps, grass cuttings etc), otherwise it can become a stinky swamp (anerobic).
Indeed. I've been doing that for a quite a number of years now.
I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.
And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.
It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.
Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.
(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)
> 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
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
This is why we can't have nice things. Juice company makes compost? Sued! Ford wants to pay his workers a living wage? Sued! Nail lawyers to trees.
Monty Don has said before that really the best and only thing you need for a great garden soil is regular addition of lots of compost. This is it on a very large scale. :)
It depends on where the hike is:
Dropping an orange peel in a humid, temperate, low-elevation place is vastly different than a desert, high-alpine, tundra or other environment where organics take a long time to decompose.
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/
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.
> 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.
Maybe they can now overturn that judgement
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/
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
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.
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).
For anthropologists and archaeologists, trash/sewage is gold.
Proud to report residential composting is now mandatory in NYC.
These machines are currently too expensive for widespread adoption, but I love the electric composter I bought that I keep in my garage.
There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.
I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
We now understand that fungus plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem. And given how easily fruit and vegetables rot and get moldy, the orange peel mass sounds like the perfect layer for the fungus to thrive in. The dead earth received a live giving blanket yielding healthy soil vegetation can thrive in.
They 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.
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.
GPs was available for civilian use since 80s, just expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation_device#Hi...
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...
One risk here is that a giant pile of biomass could allow nefarious critters to grow disproportionately. For example, in Alaska, they had giant brush piles that ended up fueling beetle infestations across the state.
Avid backyard gardener here. When we moved to our new house in Fort Wayne our yard was a real problem child. It was a new build in an old neighborhood. All the other houses where about 40ish years old. Ours had also had a 40 year old house, but at some point that house was abandoned, eventually condemned and then knocked down. Eventually a builder snapped up the lot and built our current house. But that means the ground had been stripped of topsoil and compacted all to hell not once, but 3 times in the past 40 years. What was left was dead heavily compacted clay subsoil. It had drainage issues in wet weather, it developed crazy deep & wide cracks in dry weather, and just generally didn't want to grow anything.
We solved it by dumping around 400 cubic yards of arborist woodchips spread 12-18 inches thick over most of the yard, then top dressed that with composted manure and worm castings. Finally, we planted a bunch of wine cap mushroom spawn (to break down the wood) and clover (to fix nitrogen and feed the fungi) over the whole thing. 3 years later we have rich loamy soil that drains well, is full of earth worms and grows anything we plant it it.
TL;DR: Add tons of carbon and nitrogen into degraded soil and the local fungi, bacteria and worms will turn that into good soil if given sufficient time.
I'm surprised they would just throw orange peels away. There are beneficial compounds in orange peels that can be extracted: limonene, hesperidin, naringin, pectin, insoluble and soluble fiber. Or, could be added to animal feed.
Presumably the reason this article delays showing you the before/after photos is to get you to scroll and see more ads, since you'll probably just close the tab after. Which sucks, but, fine.
What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?
If you’re using Safari on iOS, the “hide distracting items” option accessible from the icon in the left of the URL bar works really well, and it remembers your choices for your next visit to the site.
> I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone
Firefox + ublock origin + consent-o-matic saves the day for me.
The actul study linked to the project... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rec.12565
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.
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.
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.
> As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.
Another data point to the thesis that it's not the earth that needs saving, it's human systems. If disruption becomes the order of the day, who's impacted the worst?
The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.
Rats and other undesirables can be attracted to compost. So it is probably best to use a composting bin, if you can.
Also try to mix in some brown/carbon (leaves, shredded paper, cardboard etc) with your green/nitrogen (food scraps, grass cuttings etc), otherwise it can become a stinky swamp (anerobic).
Indeed. I've been doing that for a quite a number of years now.
I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.
And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.
It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.
Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.
(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)
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?
Previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=orange+peel
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!
> 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
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.
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".
This is why we can't have nice things. Juice company makes compost? Sued! Ford wants to pay his workers a living wage? Sued! Nail lawyers to trees.
Monty Don has said before that really the best and only thing you need for a great garden soil is regular addition of lots of compost. This is it on a very large scale. :)
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.
life's too short for friends like that
Why dump the peel when you can use the entire orange to make that nasty orange British drink.