Scientists Dump Tons Of Orange Peels Into A Field · Video

Two scientists dumped 12,000 tons of oranges in Guanacaste, Costa Rica; 16 years later, the result is breathtaking!


In the mid-1990s, 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp were purposefully unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.

A team led by Princeton University researchers surveyed the land 16 years after the orange peels were deposited. They found a 176 percent increase in aboveground biomass - or the wood in the trees - within the 3-hectare area studied (7 acres). Their results are published in the journal Restoration Ecology.

The original idea was sparked by husband-wife team Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, both ecologists at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked as researchers and technical advisers for many years at Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG, Guanacaste Conservation Area) in Costa Rica. Janzen and Hallwachs, who graduated from Princeton in 1976, have focused the latter half of their careers on ensuring a future for endangered tropical forest ecosystems.

In 1997, Janzen and Hallwachs presented an attractive deal to Del Oro, an orange juice manufacturer that had just begun production along the northern border of Área de Conservación Guanacaste. If Del Oro would donate part of its forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, the company could deposit its orange peel waste for biodegradation, at no cost, on degraded land within the park.

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.

In the summer of 2013, Treuer was discussing potential research avenues with Janzen when they discussed the site in Costa Rica. Janzen said that, while taxonomists (biologists who classify organisms) had visited the area, no one had really done a thorough evaluation. So, while on another research trip to Costa Rica, Treuer decided to stop by the site to see what had changed over the past decade.

"It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road," Treuer said. "I knew we needed to come up with some really robust metrics to quantify exactly what was happening and to back up this eye-test, which was showing up at this place and realizing visually how stunning the difference was between fertilized and unfertilized areas."


Read More at Princeton.edu - Orange is the new green: How orange peels revived a Costa Rican forest
Posted By Gremelin Posted on January 24th, 2019

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