![]() ![]() The national park gets more land, and Del Oro gets free, carefully monitored waste disposal that’s theoretically beneficial to the land. But it was carefully thought-through: Del Oro, which does not use pesticides or insecticides, would only be permitted to certain waste-namely orange peels and orange pulp-in designated dumping zones marked as degraded, meaning the soil quality was poor and the forest couldn’t rebound like it used to. So the plan to dump agricultural waste in a national park might seem insane. ![]() Costa Ricans are tremendously proud of their status as one of the world’s greenest and most ecologically-minded countries. Twenty-five percent of the country is federally protected, and they pour money into environmental causes, including the creation of tens of thousands of jobs supported by ecotourism and environmental protection. This is partly an economic decision Costa Rica is a startlingly beautiful and insanely biodiverse country, with only 0.03 percent of the world’s landmass but 6 percent of its biodiversity. It’s the only country in the Western Hemisphere without a standing army, and since the 1980s, it’s been a world leader in environmental preservation. In 2013, 15 years after the dumping stopped, a group of Princeton University researchers went back to Guanacaste and found that the dumping area was not only surviving, but thriving.Ĭosta Rica is an extremely unusual country in lots of ways. Del Oro owned some land bordering the Guanacaste Conservation Area, a national park in the northwestern corner of the country, and in exchange for signing that land over to the national park, the company would be allowed to dump certain agricultural waste in certain areas of the park. In 1997, two ecologists from the University of Pennsylvania collaborated with Del Oro, a then-two-year-old fruit juice company based in Costa Rica. ![]()
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