Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

sciencealert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#111

Post by pseudohadamard »

zahlman wrote: post #80
acomjean wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infil…

> Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. Can useful energy be recovered from this?

There used to be a huge flare at a landfill near here but at some point they redirected it to energy generation, around 200-250kWe from gas that was just going to waste before then.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#112

Post by pseudohadamard »

PaulHoule wrote: post #43
mlyle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People sometimes build stuff on top of landfills.

Several schools I know of have part of their playing fields on reclaimed land that's former landfill. You can't build on it because you have no idea what sort of gases and possibly toxins will work their way up from below, but wide open fields with free air movement that aren't round-the-clock occupied are fine. The only downside is that for an initial period you need to re-cap places with soil every few years as the fill underneath settles. There was one place where they'd paved over it rather than leaving it as soil to create tennis courts and after a few years it was a sort of dune landscape since they couldn't backfill the dips with soil. It was quite picturesque actually, a sort of post-apocalyptic look with miniature ponds with reeds growing in them and occasional visits from ducks. Sure, they'd lose a kid in one from time to time, but being a large school they didn't have a shortage of those.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#113

Post by Rendello »

fainpul wrote: post #45
jillesvangurp wrote: post #41

Turning degraded land back into fertile land is actually very feasible and not as hopeless as it may seem. A lot of the damage people have done to landscapes in recent centuries is still reversible. There are a lot of examples all over the world of people turning dried out and heavily eroded land back into fertile land with great bio diversity. Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even j…

As demonstrated in "The Biggest Little Farm" [1]. However it took years of hard work. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/

In that case, it also took a boatload of investor money, keeping on the previous farm staff, and endless volunteer labour by way of WWOOF [1]. Not that any of that's a bad thing, but the whole time I was watching it I was thinking did they really just start off by saying:

> We sensed it was coming. The landlord called. Todd had to go. Moving to another apartment wouldn’t stop Todd’s barking. And then it hit us. Molly’s dream could be the answer to everything. We had a great idea with no way to pay for it. [...] it eventually connected us to some investors who actually saw this old way of farming as the future.

How did two city-slicker non-farmers manage to get investment for a large, fully-staffed farm? I imagine the fact that they'd been spending the last 20 years making documentaries had something to do with it, and surely they weren't going to end up with a film saying "we thought we could make our natural organic farm work, boy were we wrong!"

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140315055010/http://www.aprico...

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#114

Post by exidy »

zokier wrote: post #60
mynegation wrote: post #19

They could not find the site and searched for it for years. A stark reminder that civilian use of GPS is relatively recent thing. The site was created in 1990s and GPS was opened for civilian use only in 1995 and gained equal accuracy by legislation in 2000.

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.

Even a sextant and decent watch should be able to get you to within a nautical mile or two.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#115

Post by CaptainJack »

Rendello wrote: post #113
fainpul wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As demonstrated in "The Biggest Little Farm" [1]. However it took years of hard work. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/

In that case, it also took a boatload of investor money, keeping on the previous farm staff, and endless volunteer labour by way of WWOOF [1]. Not that any of that's a bad thing, but the whole time I was watching it I was thinking did they really just start off by saying : > We sensed it was coming. The landlord called. Todd had to go. Moving to another apartment wouldn’t stop Todd’s barking. And then it hit us. Moll…

Said farmers were family of the founder of a large HFT firm.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#116

Post by ignoramous »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #52
sophacles wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

> Reading this feels like a great metaphor

One of the more famous Urdu poem ends:

  nahīñ hai nā-umīd 'iqbāl' apnī kisht-e-vīrāñ se
  zarā nam ho to ye miTTī bahut zarḳhez hai saaqi

  Do not despair over barren fields.
  The soil is so fertile; a little rain is enough.
(The entire Urdu poem which probably is comparable to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" is pretty good).

https://www.rekhta.org/couplets/nahiin-hai-naa-umiid-iqbaal-...

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#117

Post by bcjdjsndon »

proee wrote: post #4

One risk here is that a giant pile of biomass could allow nefarious critters to grow disproportionately. For example, in Alaska, they had giant brush piles that ended up fueling beetle infestations across the state.

I wonder what fuelled the human infestation currently ravaging the Americas.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#118

Post by bcjdjsndon »

arnorhs wrote: post #14

Does orange peel not produce any CO2 / methane when left like this? I'm assuming there is some negative carbon footprint before this becomes a positive? The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article. The article does say > Especially since, in…

The fuh? Oranges a climate risk? You've gone full 360 crazy there

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#119

Post by rayiner »

ethagnawl wrote: post #108
rayiner wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most municipalities collect recycling and then just landfill it: https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/ . I find it very difficult to imagine that composting is actually legit.

You can't just label a program like this "a scam" on the basis of ... your feelings? Intuition? Biases? In other contexts, that's libel. It looks legit to me, based on a few minutes of web searching: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/compost-gi...

It's an inference from the evidence showing that municipal recycling programs are a scam: https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/qjbzxi/recyc...

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#120

Post by krisroadruck »

eudamoniac wrote: post #103
krisroadruck wrote: post #62

Avid backyard gardener here. When we moved to our new house in Fort Wayne our yard was a real problem child. It was a new build in an old neighborhood. All the other houses where about 40ish years old. Ours had also had a 40 year old house, but at some point that house was abandoned, eventually condemned and then knocked down. Eventually a builder snapped up the lot and built our current house. But that means the gro…

Not snark: did you actually improve the soil, or did you just add a bunch of good soil? How is the soil doing 2 or 3 feet down? I'm currently improving my soil via a series of cover crops chosen to fix nitrogen and aerate soil, but it's yet to be seen how well it turns out.

It's not a hard transition between the layer I added up top and the stuff below, so bioturbation is happening - but it's a slow process. I've helped it along a little with broad forking but it will take many more years to impact soil 3 feet below the surface. On the bright side, that matters to me not at all, because nothing I'm growing has a root zone that deep. 12-18 inches of improvement is plenty for gardening and overkill if you just want a lawn.

Keep in mind pure organic matter does not a soil make. It's the mix of that organic matter + the inorganic substrate. So I added a bunch of organic matter to turn the dead compacted inorganic substrate (degraded pewamo urban complex series clay subsoil in my case) into good soil. The organic matter + fungi help that heavy clay to stable macro aggregates which let the soil drain. The humus the organic matter turns into help regulate soil moisture in dry conditions and provides the right environment for all the soil microfauna need to do their thing. Essentially I restored the O & A horizons, and over time the B horizon will improve.

Cover cropping is great btw, but you might want to get a soil sample analyzed. We had less than half a percent of organic matter when we moved in. Really you want that up in the 5-8% territory. More towards the higher end if your soil is clay dominant like ours. Cover cropping alone wouldn't have gotten us to that number in my lifetime.

Post reply on HN