Juice Company Dumps 12,000 Tons of Waste Orange Peel in a Barren Pasture. Here’s How the Place Transformed

Nothing in nature goes to waste. Even something that was once alive and is now dead is utilized by nature’s efficient recycling algorithm. In 1998, this Costa Rican park was nothing but a patch of barren pasture. Considered abandoned and useless, the pasture became a dumping ground for thousands of truckloads of waste orange peels from a juice company under a contract. 16 years later, when some researchers visited the pasture, they couldn’t find the former wasteland. After much investigation, they realized the magic nature had worked. The barren pasture and the orange peels, both discarded, married each other and birthed a new world. Their research findings are published in the journal Restorative Ecology. 

The original idea popped up in the brains of Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, both ecologists at the University of Pennsylvania, according to a press release. At this time, a juice company named Del Oro had opened an outlet on the land bordering the Guanacaste Conservation Area. Janzen and Hallwachs reached out to the company with an unusual project. If the company donated part of its land to the national park, it would be allowed to dump its discarded orange peels in a degraded patch of the land. Del Ore desperately needed a place to dump their peels, so, they agreed.

In the coming days, over 12,000 tons of waste orange peels were hauled in thousands of trucks. The truckloads of peels were jettisoned onto the lifeless soils of the land. To those dumping the peels, the patch of land was now an inhospitable place, useless, lifeless, and worthless. As peels began to rot, they turned black and the entire place became a stinky, gooey litter undesirable to humans. "[W]ithin about six months the orange peels had been converted from orange peels into this thick black loamy soil," ecologist Timothy Treuer from Princeton University, told Scientific American. "Kind of passing through this gross stage in between of kind of sludgy stuff filled with fly larvae."

However, while the field was unattended, nature worked its magic. The lifeless soil slathered with the gooey black muddle started to breathe. Nobody wanted the orange peels and nobody wanted this barren land. But it seemed, they both wanted each other. The dirty gunk spewed a deluge of nutrients into soil particles, stirring them alive, probably for the first time in a million years. Gradually, the black muck of the rotting orange peels started disappearing from the land. By the time the soil had soaked in the entire gloop of peels, the land was no longer a wasteland. The soil that was once lifeless was now pulsating with fertility hormones. And the patch which was considered useless by humans was now a lush, dense rainforest, a pristine ecosystem never thought of.

In 2013, when Treuer decided to visit the location, he was puzzled. When he couldn’t find the formerly arid landscape, he was about to tiptoe backward, just when he stumbled upon a familiar yellow sign. It was the sign that he and his fellow researchers had carved into this forested area. He gasped. "It didn't help that the six-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site was so overgrown with vines that we literally didn't find it until years later," Treuer told Popular Science, "after dozens and dozens of site visits."  

It was beyond imagination how 16 years of isolation could rejuvenate a barren land. "I strongly suspect that it was some synergy between suppression of the invasive grass and rejuvenation of heavily degraded soils," reflected Treuer. In the end, it turned out to be a win-win situation for both the company and the park managers. And even though this isn’t a license for other companies to recklessly dump their wastes on barren lands, it is indeed an interesting illustration of how thoughtful repurposing of agricultural waste can literally save our planet.