Orange is the new green!

One never imagined orange peels turning into a forest. However, this has been possible that too after 16 years.

A team from Princeton University purposefully dumped orange pulp and orange peels onto a barren field in Costa Rican national park. Little did they know that after 16 years the area would be a lush green forest.

After 16 years, the team surveyed the land and they found a 176% raise in aboveground biomass within the 3-hectare (7-acre) area studied. They published their research in the journal Restoration Ecology.

Timothy Treuer, the co-lead author expressed, “This is one of the only instances I’ve ever heard of where you can have cost-negative carbon sequestration. It’s not just a win-win between the company and the local park — it’s a win for everyone.”

In 1997, the idea was put forward to Del Oro, an orange juice manufacturer. The company dumped 12,000 tones of orange peel. However, a year after signing the contract, a rival company TicoFruit sued Del Oro for ‘defiling a national park’. TicoFruit won the case resulting in overlooking the orange peel covered land for 15 years, as written in the official website of Princeton university.

Visiting after 16 years, Treuer explained what he saw, “It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road. I knew we needed to come up with some really robust metrics to quantify exactly what was happening and to back up this eye-test, which was showing up at this place and realizing visually how stunning the difference was between fertilized and unfertilized areas.”

The researchers created several transects in the orange peel area. These transects were 100--meter-long parallel lies throughout the forest with 3 meters tall trees. When the team compared the land without the peels, they found huge differences; the area with peels had richer soil, greater tree biomass, more tree-species and larger forest canopy closure, informed Science Alert.

One of the researchers Jonathan Choi exclaimed, “The site was more impressive in person than I could’ve imagined. While I would walk over exposed rock and dead grass in the nearby fields, I’d have to climb through undergrowth and cut paths through walls of vines in the orange peel site itself.”