
Photo: Princeton University

Photo: Princeton University/ZME Science
“It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road,” Timothy Treuer recently told Princeton University. “I knew we needed to come up with some really robust metrics to quantify exactly what was happening and to back up this eye-test, which was showing up at this place and realizing visually how stunning the difference was between fertilized and unfertilized areas.” “The site was more impressive in person than I could’ve imagined,” added Jonathan Choi, who was a senior studying ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton when he joined Treuer’s research team. “While I would walk over exposed rock and dead grass in the nearby fields, I’d have to climb through undergrowth and cut paths through walls of vines in the orange peel site itself.”
Photo: Princeton University
But this visual difference between the 3-hectare orange peel dump site and the surrounding degraded land was not enough to confirm that the fruit waste was responsible for the revival of plant life. Treuer and his team spent months picking up samples, analyzing and comparing them. They found “dramatic differences between the areas covered in orange peels and those that were not. The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness and greater forest canopy closure.” “This is one of the only instances I’ve ever heard of where you can have cost-negative carbon sequestration,” Treuer said. “It’s not just a win-win between the company and the local park — it’s a win for everyone.”
Photo: Princeton University
The effect that the orange peels had on the land are probably not that surprising to people familiar with composting, but what is downright shocking is that a judge actually called this particular example “defiling” of a national park and stopped it from going forward. Now that Timothy Treuer’s study has received worldwide attention, this type of defiling is being seriously considered as a way of bringing tropical forests back to life. “Plenty of environmental problems are produced by companies, which, to be fair, are simply producing the things people need or want,” said David Wilcox, co-author of the Princeton study. “But an awful lot of those problems can be alleviated if the private sector and the environmental community work together. I’m confident we’ll find many more opportunities to use the ‘leftovers’ from industrial food production to bring back tropical forests. That’s recycling at its best.”
Photo: Princeton University
via ZME Science