The original paper is here: <a href="https://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/rec.12565" rel="nofollow">https://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/rec.12565</a><p>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.<p>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.
Tangentially, if you want to reduce the waste that goes to landfill at your home, compost.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Here is an article about this posted on Princetons news site (August 22nd):<p><a href="https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest" rel="nofollow">https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...</a><p>It cites an interesting court case by a rival company that occurred after the contact to dump was signed:<p>"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."
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.<p>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!"
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.<p>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.
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.<p>I do wish they had ph tested the soil before so we could know whether the orange peels altered the soils acidity.
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.
more generally, densely planted trees can use a wide variety of biomass sources for compost: <a href="https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-really-fast-d27df202ba09" rel="nofollow">https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...</a>
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...
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.<p>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.<p>#permaculture