I'm surprised they would just throw orange peels away. There are beneficial compounds in orange peels that can be extracted: limonene, hesperidin, naringin, pectin, insoluble and soluble fiber. Or, could be added to animal feed.
12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
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Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#72It's recently occurred to me how "valuable" today's trash is likely to be considered in the future. I'll focus on organics here but I think the plastics will be equally valuable, too. I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change:…
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
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.
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#73The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.
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?
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#74Does 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…
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 aero…
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.
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#75I have 45acres of low-grade agricultural land, and if someone dropped 12k tons of compostable material on it, I'd be delighted.
Where do I sign up?
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#76This being HN - might there be any Costa Rican lawyers in the house? It would be extremely interesting to hear about the legal merits of the rival company's lawsuit, and the politics of the Supreme Court.
It's the kind of question that I'd rather see answered by an ecologist than a judge!
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?
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#77The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.
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).
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#78I have 45acres of low-grade agricultural land, and if someone dropped 12k tons of compostable material on it, I'd be delighted. Where do I sign up?
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...
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
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…
Well they weren't allowed to do it for free - they had to give up some of their land which had value.
Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
#80It's recently occurred to me how "valuable" today's trash is likely to be considered in the future. I'll focus on organics here but I think the plastics will be equally valuable, too. I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change:…
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?