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Better management of discarded produce could help forests regrow
- sova 9y agoGrow food closer to face
- trapperkeeper74 9y agoForests 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.
- jvolkman 9y agoFrom the title I was expecting something criminal.
- adjkant 9y agoAs 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 9y agoI 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.
- pvg 9y agoMaybe there's a better source for this somewhere than 'blogspam copy of a clickbait site'.
- verroq 9y agoIt's a copy paste of https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels-in-a-national-park-heres-what-it-looks-like-now?c=ufb1 https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels...
- pvg 9y agoThat's what I said.
- dang 9y agoOk, we'll change the URL to that god help us from 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/ http://www.the-daily-llama.com/2017/08/23/a-juice-company-du.... 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 9y agoI feel like the original paper, as linked further up, might do a better job at allowing you to not have to link to Upworthy.
- seattle_spring 9y agoUgh. 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.
- adjkant 9y ago> “We don’t want companies to go out there will-nilly just dumping their waste all over the place, but if it’s scientifically driven and restorationists are involved in addition to companies, this is something I think has really high potential,” Treuer says.
- lsllc 9y agoOk, 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 9y agoThrowing things that could be eaten by wild animals near trails or roads could draw animals closer to humans, having some unfortunate unintentional consequences.
- lsllc 9y agoDon'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?
- roflchoppa 9y agoAt 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.
- rjurney 9y agoThis 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 9y ago>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?
- pcunite 9y agoI wonder what would happen if a bunch of candy bars were dumped?
- HillaryBriss 9y agomore generally, densely planted trees can use a wide variety of biomass sources for compost: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-really-fast-d27df202ba09 https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...
- jonchang 9y agoThe 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.
- umanwizard 9y agoI must be missing something -- how is dumping rights on 3 hectares of some land worth 1600 hectares of other land? How could this possibly be a better deal for them than clearing 3 hectares of their land, dumping whatever they wanted to there, and selling the other 1597?
- jonchang 9y agoThe company was going to build a multimillion dollar plant (1997 dollars) to process the waste. Instead they just gave away a bunch of land they weren't going to develop anyway. Also just because you own some land doesn't mean it's legal to do whatever you want with it, especially industrial uses like dumping waste. Costa Rica is probably one of the better countries in terms of protecting its natural resources (compared to say, recent events in Brazil) so it's unlikely that they could have just ignored laws. I would encourage you to read the original paper, and in general always go for original sources; they are surprisingly readable if you know what you can skip and what you have to look up.
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- LarryMade2 9y agoWonder 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...
- cwkoss 9y agoThe 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!"
- QAPereo 9y agoWe're basically already there, it's how funding for a not inconsiderable number of studies is found.
- jonchang 9y agoIf 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 9y agoAcidity of the peels affected the acidity of the soil.
- jonchang 9y agoThis 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 9y agoI'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.
- mjsweet 9y agoHere is an article about this posted on Princetons news site (August 22nd): https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h... 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."
- vapemaster 9y agothis is a ridiculous title.
- rmason 9y agoThe 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 9y agoThe acids in orange peels are organic; they would have been consumed by soil microbes as a carbon source pretty quickly.
- hinkley 9y agoBurying 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.
- ValleyOfTheMtns 9y agoTangentially, 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 9y agoSources or directions? Highly interested in doing this. I have a decent garden going and I've been looking at options for composting.
- wavefunction 9y agoIt'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.
- foxhop 9y agoIts 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
- notadoc 9y agoAlternate headline: A web click farm discovers composting