A juice company dumped orange peels in a national park. This is what it looks like today
a year ago by ByteOnBikes to c/climate
...one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot. The site was left untouched and largely unexamined for over a decade. A sign was placed to ensure future researchers could locate and study it.
16 years later, Janzen dispatched graduate student Timothy Treuer to look for the site where the food waste was dumped.
Treuer initially set out to locate the large placard that marked the plot — and failed.
It's because citrus at high concentrations kills earthworms. Citrus in compost in normal quantities relative to other compostables seems to be fine, but you shouldn't be trying to compost a huge pile of just pulp and orange peels in your back yard.
As for why this worked here, I'm sure there are a whole lot of things that aren't earthworms living in a formerly rainforested spot in Costa Rica which can break that stuff down over 15 years.
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@slrpnk.net
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
go to feed...
There are two pictures of it “currently” (I use quotes because it is a republication of an 8 year old article). And neither one really shows what it looks like today.
But there is a lot of growth. Which makes me wonder why people say to not compost citrus peels.
When we bought our composter the group selling them had a seminar as part of the purchase to teach you how to compost and no citrus was one of the top things they said with no explanation even when asked. I also used to do layouts for children’s books and one was about composting and it reiterated this.
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