“Just like us, forests move faster with a little coffee in their system.
A recent experiment tested whether coffee pulp, a leftover of the coffee growing process, could help bring Costa Rica’s rainforests back to life. Researchers from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa tested two plots to see how the coffee waste would affect deforested land, covering one parcel of grass with about 20 inches of the pulp and leaving the other untouched.
At each site, land had been exploited for years, either to grow coffee or raise cattle, and was eventually abandoned. It was dominated by invasive grasses, primarily an African species called palisade grass, used to feed grazing livestock. The grass can reach 16 feet tall when not trimmed by grazing animals, preventing native rainforests from easily regrowing.
After two years, the plot of land given a boost from coffee showed a dramatic improvement. Eighty percent of the plot was covered by young tree canopy, some trees already 15 feet—including tropical species that can grow as tall as 60 feet—versus just 20 percent in the untreated plot. In the coffee-fueled plot, trees were also four times taller on average, soil samples were more nutrient-rich, and invasive grasses had been eliminated.
The results were published in the journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
Not only does it give coffee producers a sustainable way to dispose of their waste, she says, but it also speeds up the timeline to bring back destroyed forests.
“It’s an amazing win-win situation,” says Rebecca Cole, a study author and ecologist from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. “It takes tropical forest hundreds of years to grow back. To have [such] tall trees in only two years is really spectacular.”
More research needs to be done, Cole acknowledges, to understand the long-term impacts of coffee pulp and whether it causes any unforeseen pollution.
Still, says Cole, “This really was like a forest on caffeine. I think it’s really promising.”
Looking for a win-win
Coffee beans are the seeds of a fruit called a coffee cherry that, when picked, looks like a bright red or yellow cherry. To get coffee beans, producers remove the fruit’s skin, pulp, and other filmy bits. They then dry and roast the remains to make the grounds that end up in your morning cup. Approximately half the weight of a coffee harvest will end up as waste.
In Costa Rica, says Rakan Zahawi, a study author and director of the Lyon Arboretum at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, coffee producers typically take all that leftover coffee residue to storage lots where it’s left to decompose.
In the early 2000s, Zahawi visited a similar restoration project using orange peels.
“The difference was night and day,” he says of forests treated with oranges and those left untouched, “There was a huge difference.”
The idea stuck with him when he began working in Costa Rica and took notice of the waste generated by the country’s large coffee industry. If the excess coffee pulp could be put to good use somehow, Cole and Zahawi thought, everyone involved—the coffee producers, land owners, and environmentalists—could benefit.
“Essentially it’s a major waste product that’s expensive to process, and they give it away for free,” says Cole. Rather than paying for the waste to be composted and stored, the only cost to the researchers was renting dump trucks to shuttle the pulp…..”
View the whole story here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/forest-on-caffeine-how-coffee-helps-forests-grow-faster