American Researchers and the Orange Peel Experiment That Worked Wonders

It started 16 years ago.

Daniel Jensen and Winnie Hallwachs—an academic couple working at the University of Pennsylvania—approached an orange juice company located in Costa Rica with an unusual proposal. They asked the company to allocate part of its land for conservation purposes while allowing it to dump its orange peels there free of charge.

The couple aimed to study the land quality in the area and observe any changes following the dispersal of the orange peels.

This is how the land looked before the ecological experiment began:

A year later, another juice company observing the project intervened, insisting that the experiment must be halted, claiming the orange peels were 'polluting' the surrounding area.

However, by the time the experiment officially ended, it had spanned 16 years, during which 1,000 trucks unloaded 12,000 tons of orange peels onto the test site. "We knew the trial would eventually be stopped, but we placed a sign saying 'Ecological Experiment in Progress' just in case," the couple recalls.

Recently, exactly 16 years later, the researchers returned to the site where they had left the sign, and they couldn’t believe their eyes.

They searched repeatedly for the sign, but it had vanished. Instead, they saw large, robust trees, dense vegetation, and a variety of plants and animals that had returned to inhabit the area—all thanks to the orange peels.

How does the area look today? See for yourself:

Mountains of orange peels scattered in the area years earlier during the experiment