Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren boglebam here with another classic episode from Our earthWhile host Christian Sager. This one has to do with some awesome environmental research that almost never came to light. I'll let Christian explain, Hey brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager. Imagine if some of Earth's most barren waste lands could be transformed into dense, productive forests by the most unlikely of helpers,
discarded fruit peels. It sounds like wishful thinking, but that's exactly what happened. In the nineteen nineties. During a promising ecological experiment, orange juice manufacturer del Oro plunked twelve thousand metric tons It's around thirteen thousand, two hundred eight tons of orange peels on top of bleak coasta Rican pasture land, eventually transforming it into a lush, fertile forest. But it's
a success story that almost wasn't told. Del Oro donated a seven acre or three hacked or plot on the edge of the Wanna Caste Conservation area after being approached by University of Pennsylvania researchers Daniel Jansen and Winnie hal Walks who wondered how the companies discarded orange peels could benefit the soil in The company deposited one thousand truckloads of orange skins onto the degraded land as part of the agreement, but rival orange squeezer Tico Fruit, sued del
Oro a year into the contract, claiming the company was defiling a national park. Costa Rica's Supreme Court agreed, and after only two years, the experiment came to a halt. That could have been the end of the story were it not for Timothy Truer, a curious ecologist at Princeton University. In Team, Truer and a team of researchers traveled to Costa Rica for unrelated research and decided to look up
the orange peel plot. The site's sign was so covered with vines and the land so densely filled with trees that it took the team years and dozens of site visits to discover it. The team sampled and studied the soil at the site and compared it to samples that were taken in the year two thousand. It also noted tree diameter and species from the orange peel site and that of a nearby pasture that wasn't treated with peels.
The researchers found that the treated area had richer soil, more tree biomass, and a broader variety of tree species, including a fig tree with a circumference equivalent to three armspans.
The precise reasons for this one hundred and seventies six percent increase and above ground biomass are still being investigated, but the researchers contend dumping massive amounts of nutrient rich organic waste had a nearly immediate effect on the land's fertility, changing its lifeless soil into a thick, rich, loamy mixture. The researchers proposed it's also probable that the orange peels suppressed growth of an invasive grass that was keeping the
forest from flourishing. Not only is the rediscovery of the experiment a boon for barren landscapes and agricultural waste, but it also could have a major impact on Earth if more companies institute similar environmentally friendly solutions to waste, the resulting richly vegetated land could help isolate harmful carbon dioxide
in the air and improve Earth's polluted atmosphere. So consider this an estimated fifty of all fresh produce in the United States, or roughly sixty six million tons or sixty million metric tons of produce is thrown away annually, making it the single largest ingredient in American land thrills. Today's episode was written by Loyal Dove and produced by Dylan Fagan and Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other green topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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