BrainStuff Classics: Can Simple Fruit Peels Revive Dead Land?

Decades after a truckloads of orange peels were added to a degraded plot of land, the pasture is flourishing. Learn more about this experiment in today's classic episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff.
Lauren boglebam here with another classic episode from Our earthWhile
host Christian Sager. This one has to do with some
awesome environmental research that almost never came to light. I'll
let Christian explain, Hey brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager. Imagine

(00:23):
if some of Earth's most barren waste lands could be
transformed into dense, productive forests by the most unlikely of helpers,
discarded fruit peels. It sounds like wishful thinking, but that's
exactly what happened. In the nineteen nineties. During a promising
ecological experiment, orange juice manufacturer del Oro plunked twelve thousand

(00:46):
metric tons It's around thirteen thousand, two hundred eight tons
of orange peels on top of bleak coasta Rican pasture land,
eventually transforming it into a lush, fertile forest. But it's
a success story that almost wasn't told. Del Oro donated
a seven acre or three hacked or plot on the

(01:09):
edge of the Wanna Caste Conservation area after being approached
by University of Pennsylvania researchers Daniel Jansen and Winnie hal
Walks who wondered how the companies discarded orange peels could
benefit the soil in The company deposited one thousand truckloads

(01:30):
of orange skins onto the degraded land as part of
the agreement, but rival orange squeezer Tico Fruit, sued del
Oro a year into the contract, claiming the company was
defiling a national park. Costa Rica's Supreme Court agreed, and
after only two years, the experiment came to a halt.

(01:52):
That could have been the end of the story were
it not for Timothy Truer, a curious ecologist at Princeton University.
In Team, Truer and a team of researchers traveled to
Costa Rica for unrelated research and decided to look up
the orange peel plot. The site's sign was so covered
with vines and the land so densely filled with trees

(02:14):
that it took the team years and dozens of site
visits to discover it. The team sampled and studied the
soil at the site and compared it to samples that
were taken in the year two thousand. It also noted
tree diameter and species from the orange peel site and
that of a nearby pasture that wasn't treated with peels.

(02:36):
The researchers found that the treated area had richer soil,
more tree biomass, and a broader variety of tree species,
including a fig tree with a circumference equivalent to three armspans.
The precise reasons for this one hundred and seventies six
percent increase and above ground biomass are still being investigated,

(02:58):
but the researchers contend dumping massive amounts of nutrient rich
organic waste had a nearly immediate effect on the land's fertility,
changing its lifeless soil into a thick, rich, loamy mixture.
The researchers proposed it's also probable that the orange peels
suppressed growth of an invasive grass that was keeping the

(03:20):
forest from flourishing. Not only is the rediscovery of the
experiment a boon for barren landscapes and agricultural waste, but
it also could have a major impact on Earth if
more companies institute similar environmentally friendly solutions to waste, the
resulting richly vegetated land could help isolate harmful carbon dioxide

(03:43):
in the air and improve Earth's polluted atmosphere. So consider
this an estimated fifty of all fresh produce in the
United States, or roughly sixty six million tons or sixty
million metric tons of produce is thrown away annually, making
it the single largest ingredient in American land thrills. Today's

(04:11):
episode was written by Loyal Dove and produced by Dylan
Fagan and Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots
of other green topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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