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.

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.

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.

Maybe they can now overturn that judgement

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/

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

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.

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).

For anthropologists and archaeologists, trash/sewage is gold.

Proud to report residential composting is now mandatory in NYC.

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.

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

They should check for new penicillin strains in this forest.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

life's too short for friends like that