As demonstrated in "The Biggest Little Farm" [1]. However it took years of hard work.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/

Often you don't even need seeds from neighboring land. The soil that remains often still has seeds sitting dormant waiting for conditions to return to healthy.

The orange peel is going to decompose and produce CO2 either way. Methane is produced when there is not enough oxygen available while decomposing, which certainly seems a possibility if it's dumped in big piles.

There's actually no guarantee that if the "experiment" were allowed to continue that the results would have been as great. If the biomass accumulated faster than it could be broken down, we might not have seen the same result.

Maybe they can now overturn that judgement

CO2 is going to be neutral for the peels. You're just transporting it from where the oranges grew to where they were dumped. The CO2 benefit is purely from the trees and other biomass that grow where they wouldn't be growing before.

As for methane, that's a good question. Orange peels are better than most things because the limonene inhibits methane producing bacteria. But you'd still get quite a bit in the deeper piles (that produce the anaerobic conditions needed for methane production).

Spreading them out more would help, but might interfere with the beneficial effects.

It's the kind of question that I'd rather see answered by an ecologist than a judge!

Even a consequentialist should accept that it would have taken 16 years to realize it was actually a good thing to do with orange peels.

They saw it as corruption, basically. Here's a contemporaneous article: https://apps.sas.upenn.edu/caterpillar/index.php?action=retr...

> TicoFrut, which is 98% Costa Rican-owned, charges that the environmental services contract is little more than a permit for improper disposal of its foreign-owned competitor's waste. TicoFrut President Carlos Odio says Del Oro should be compelled to build a proper waste-disposal plant just as his company was forced to do in the mid-1990s amid allegations that orange waste from its juicing plant was polluting a nearby river. So TicoFrut teamed up with a high-profile environmentalist and radio host, Alexander Bonilla, and enlisted the support of two prominent congressmen and a few citrus growers in denouncing the Del Oro project. However, none of Costa Rica's conservation groups joined in the attack on Del Oro.

[...]

> One of the ministers they cited was the acting environment minister at the time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, who signed the contract on behalf of the government. Rodriguez, an attorney, denied having sat on Del Oro's board but acknowledged representing the company while working in a law firm contracted by the CDC, Del Oro's British owners. The other official, Agriculture Minister Esteban Brenes, acknowledged having sat on Del Oro's board but denied any involvement with the contract.

> TicoFrut also claimed foreign employees of the CDC and, by extension, Del Oro, had received diplomatic immunity as a sweetener to invest, and could thus act with impunity.

> The Costa Rican Ombudsman's Office conducted its own review and declared the contract illegal. In its non-binding ruling, the ombudsman's office said no official studies had been done on the viability of the orange-waste experiment, and that due process had not been followed before the contract's signing

It once struck me that it is unimaginative to assume this is their first planet.

Ask your county extention are dnr. Different states do this differently but most states have programs with experts who know what works in your area and what the options are.

Not sure what is the biome of the land, but you can look for the work of Ernst Götsch[1] and Syntropic Farming [1].

The main idea is introducing biomass in layers and heavy pruning, start planting a lot of short-life plants (like grass) while also planting some medium-life plants (like bushes or small trees). Prune the grass on every seasonal cycle keeping the cut leafs on the ground. Repeat the cycle while also introducing long-life plants (like bigger trees, preferably fruit-bearing trees). Another idea is having plants that seek for water deep underground, those eventually bring streams and creaks back to life.

When you understand it, the plan sounds simple, you are just speeding up the natural cycles of the location, using grass to fix carbon and generate biomass while other trees grow in the vegetation. It is pretty impressive

Edit: added a better link explaining Synthropic Farming

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...

on the other hand, basic surveying is centuries old. if you lose square km patch of land, it is not due lack of technology even in the previous century.

GPs was available for civilian use since 80s, just expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation_device#Hi...

California has a low-double-digit percentage of the US population, and mandates organic waste separation/collection.

https://calrecycle.ca.gov/Organics/SLCP/collection/

For anthropologists and archaeologists, trash/sewage is gold.

For those who can't or find dealing with compost a challenge, there are also other options to recycle biowaste. It's a bit of pricey subscription, but we have a Mill which processes most food waste into chicken feed (you do have to mail the processed food to them for further processing).

These machines are currently too expensive for widespread adoption, but I love the electric composter I bought that I keep in my garage.

There's no grossness or work involved. You just dump stuff in it and it cooks it down to something dirt-like(nearly but not quite compost ready) in less than a day.

I have municipal compost, but it's only picked up every 2 weeks, so that meant I needed to keep food scraps around for two weeks before pick up, so they either would get super gross and smelly, or I had to use my chest freezer to store them and make that gross and smelly and dedicated to just compost.

Reading this feels like a great metaphor to life that I am unable to explain but I will still try, in the sense that, within a degraded land with just the right conditions, it is just waiting to grow :D

You're getting downvoted but it's a reasonable question if posed in good faith. The tl;dr is that there are really a few options for what could happen to those orange peels:

(1) Landfill burial

   (1a) Without methane capture and use: Produces methane, relatively high short term warming potential.
   (1b) With methane capture and use: Ends up as CO2 after burning the methane.

(2) Composting (this approach)

   (2a) Mostly aerobic: Produces CO2
   (2b) Mostly anaerobic: Produces methane

A deep pile that is never turned will decompose anaerobically, resulting in fairly undesirable methane. A shallower pile or one that is mixed well will result in mostly aerobic decomposition. The aerobic decomposition will produce CO2 but not huge amounts of it. Each hectare of land could absorb something like ~8 tons of CO2 per year; with 7 hectares, the CO2 emitted by composting 12t of oranges is going to be dwarfed by the new vegetation. After a few years when you're growing big trees, the rate of CO2 absorption might rise as high as 20-30t/year/hectare in costa rica's environment. And this is probably an underestimate, as the soil amendment of the orange peels seems to have stimulated faster regrowth than would have happened otherwise.

And perhaps more to the point: There isn't really a purely "no co2" way of disposing of organic matter other than perhaps burying it at the bottom of a deep mineshaft (but the co2 or methane will be produced anyway). Landfilling it is strictly worse - you still get the decomposition products, _or worse_ because you'll mostly get methane, but without producing useful soil byproducts.

Overall this project is a huge win on a carbon perspective and a waste reduction perspective.

I worked for a time designing and building landfills. Nothing really rots in them typically as it’s really dry and don’t have good access to oxygen. Modern landfills are like giant plastic bags. This is to protect ground water.

Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infiltration.

We dug up trash from the 70s to extend the landfill out. It was in remarkably good shape.

https://planetliner.com/landfill-cap/

The thought occurred to me some 25+ years ago that today's landfills will be tomorrow's mines. I hope it isn't true but taking the very long view I'm afraid it will be.

See https://www.floridatrend.com/article/14356/trashed-plan-to-u...

St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

Proud to report residential composting is now mandatory in NYC.

Mostly.

Remember the orange trees took the CO2 out of the atmosphere to make the peels. Some of it, probably most of it, is going back into the atmosphere but some of it is going to become soil carbon which could be retained for decades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_carbon

Soil carbon is like dark matter in that there is a lot of it and it is poorly understood.

My guess is that Del Oro would have a competitive advantage in its waste disposal costs.

Indeed. I've been doing that for a quite a number of years now.

I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.

And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.

It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.

Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.

(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)

If you’re using Safari on iOS, the “hide distracting items” option accessible from the icon in the left of the URL bar works really well, and it remembers your choices for your next visit to the site.

Ngl I didn't know there was another way to compost. The whole idea is to just throw vegetable waste into a pile and let it turn into dirt, isn't it?

Rats and other undesirables can be attracted to compost. So it is probably best to use a composting bin, if you can.

Also try to mix in some brown/carbon (leaves, shredded paper, cardboard etc) with your green/nitrogen (food scraps, grass cuttings etc), otherwise it can become a stinky swamp (anerobic).

I guess tico fruit is just an asshole. Being sued is usually bad. If you can sue your competitor even better.

The kind of issue that's better decided by an ecologist than by a judge, true.

My curiosity is about how the legal system got it wrong - simplistic or outdated laws, or clueless or corrupt judges, or some combination, or something else?

The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!

I mean it makes sense if you were just forced to implement an expensive waste management system and your competitor gets to just dump the stuff on the ground in a National Park. I would complain too.

Life...finds a way.

It's not a reasonable question. What's the alternative for the orange peels? They were going to rot and release that CO2 whether they did it in a big pile here or somewhere else.

Thanks for the share, crazy that 1-2mm polyethylene is all it takes to cap a landfill.

Practical Engineering put out an excellent video on landfills a couple years back, well worth the watch for the visualizations alone.

https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44

A british inventor created a setup with two long vibrating plates with ferrofluid in between. A flaky powder made from garbage was dumped in on one side and came out the other end beautifully separated in many layers by density. (with one mixed layers in between that went back in at the beginning) Innitially he "knew" it was silly to use something as expensive as ferrofluid but planned to try other substances if it worked. It turned out the process produced a lot more ferrofluid than it used.

No one was interested in further research.

edit: I see some research is now happening.

Yeah, reminds me of Changing World Technologies -- so much hope, so little reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies

In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.

Today’s landfills are already used for natural gas generation.

It's doubtful that'll ever happen in Dutchess County but I can dream.

We already mine landfills -- mostly for land reclamation but sometimes to recover resources.

In the longer run, when there's been more compaction, settling, and densification (and changes in what things are valuable), and more need to reclaim land that was previously landfilled, we will do this more.

> Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn.

Can useful energy be recovered from this?

Please elaborate. From what i know based on prior research, most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC ? Are you implying that all buildings have now must build a 3rd chute specifically for compost ? And who's picking up that compost ? NYC Trash collection ?

I've seen compost vending machines in my visits to NYC and a few other places, but i've yet anyone using them

They should check for new penicillin strains in this forest.

They also mentioned that invasive grass species were suppressed by the orange peels which likely contributed to native plants thriving better.

life's too short for friends like that

It depends on where the hike is: Dropping an orange peel in a humid, temperate, low-elevation place is vastly different than a desert, high-alpine, tundra or other environment where organics take a long time to decompose.

I may be wrong but isnt most of the tree carbon capture over stated as in the overwhelming majority comes from algae in the oceans?

While forests are great they are not the best focus iirc compared to the oceans.

It doesn't make sense if you were forced to implement waste management because you did it poorly to start with and your competitor found a smart way to do it for cheap.

> I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone

Firefox + ublock origin + consent-o-matic saves the day for me.

That's why I said if asked in good faith. :-)

But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgive some naivety here absent demonstrated malice.

At some sites, the methane is burned in gas engine to generate electricity. Some sites build a CHP and resales the heat for district heating. The engines may need more maintenance due to silicate in the gas.

[delayed]

Yes, any landfill of any size is going to clean this up a bit and run it through a generator. They can get contracts from the utility to use so much power per week (whatever the tank capacity iso and since the utility controls when it is on (that is when other renewables are low) they get a higher price. The details are complex, but thus is very valuable green renewable (we can debate how green and renewable eslewhere) energy to a utility.

In a way, they might have been right. Who knows whether or not a continuation of the active experiment would have pushed it over a tipping point where the positive effects were nullified. Maybe part of the "magic" is that they literally left it there to rot.

> TicoFrut President Carlos Odio says Del Oro should be compelled to build a proper waste-disposal plant just as his company was forced to do in the mid-1990s amid allegations that orange waste from its juicing plant was polluting a nearby river.

This is the work of a petty man child. This is how it reads to me: "I got caught being a lazy irresponsible cheap-skate who was illegally dumping and had to pay. Meanwhile, these intelligent forward-thinking jerks find an environmentally beneficial way to dispose of their waste for free! I'll show them and take those goody two shoes down a peg!"

People sometimes build stuff on top of landfills.

It's apparently long enough for me to see the same orange peel in the same place over a year or two.

I'm mostly joking.. LNT is always the best policy, even if only (sometimes) for the feeling of pristineness.

Honestly orange peels are incredible, the smell, the robustness. It reminds me of the joke of the plastic cup at Whole Foods filled with orange slices. If only there was a natural packaging alternative...

Yes. A potential method of capture is to seed the ocean with more iron [1], to help the algae.

I assume that China will be the first to do these sorts of things, since the west will be too hogtied in regulations, lawsuits, and bureaucracy.

[1] https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/02/17/ocean-iron-fertilizat...

Indeed, sometimes big things. The landfill we used when I was growing up is now beneath a Home Depot, which was built over the top of it almost 25 years ago. The landfill in this case was unlined, too.

Yup. It is a little undesirable for various reasons, and not every landfill is suitable for construction on top (seismics, sealing/capping technique, materials, etc).

it could have been corruption and something that turned out well in the end

Like ski courses!

I'm also disappointed by the decision, but I get the argument made from the business perspective. I'm required to dispose my waste properly and its reflected in my prices, my competitor is not doing these practices and they should be compelled to follow the same regulations. I'm just disappointed that their court sided with the business since a better resolution would've been "your company can do this too if you just do the legwork".

China could definitely do this, to offset the minuscule of the destruction they do with the dark fishing fleets around (and possibly in) protected marine areas.

Well they weren't allowed to do it for free - they had to give up some of their land which had value.