Juice company dumps orange peel over wasteland – see the stunning results 16 years later

Louise Scrivens

It was in the mid-nineties when Costa Rican juice company Del Oro, which doesn’t use pesticides or insecticides, was given permission to dump its orange peel and pulp in a national park.

The company was only permitted to dump its fruit waste in “designated dumping zones marked as degraded, meaning the soil quality was poor and the forest couldn’t rebound like it used to,” according to modernfarmer.com

Before environmental issues were front page news Costa Rica was a world leader in environmental preservation.

And quite rightly so considering the staggering natural beauty of this rugged, rainforested Central American country.

‘Richer soil’

Fifteen years later researchers from Princeton University decided to visit the area of Guanacaste to see if the 12,000 metric tons of fruit waste that was dumped had changed the landscape.

They discovered something quite extraordinary: “richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness and greater forest canopy closure” in the dumping area, according to a Princeton press release.

The area was completely transformed, what was once considered wasteland was now a thriving green paradise.

Princeton recently published their findings  from this incredible experiment, which was not without controversy.

Thanks to something as seemingly insignificant as fruit peelings, led ecologists to discover something that could help change the face of other areas we thought were lost to deforestation.

Hopefully, this will help inspire other projects in the future.

 

Nature is something precious that we have to take care of for future generations. 

Please share to inspire others to think differently about how we dispose of our waste and look after our beautiful planet.

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