It’s no secret that good compost improves soil, but many urban juice joints don’t bother getting licenses to cart their leftover peels and pulp to local composters, either because it’s too expensive or because the scraps are too “wet and heavy” to be useful, says FERN contributing editor Elizabeth Royte in Modern Farmer. Each 16-ounce glass of juice produces, on average, 4.5 pounds pulp—which gets dumped into landfills where it rots and produces methane.
David Buckel, senior organics recovery coordinator for the NYC Compost Project, said that fruit and vegetable rinds don’t work for his compost mix. That’s because the pulp is highly degradable and microbes tear into it, consuming oxygen and producing acids that slow the breakdown, explained Will Brinton, the founder of Woods End Laboratories, a soil-testing firm in Mount Vernon, Me.
Brinton said the trick is adding more oxygen and carbon-based materials like “wood chips, sawdust, and yard dust,” but these are things urban composters can’t easily get.
Alternatively, juicers can dry their waste and turn it into cattle feed, a practice supported by the EPA. The agency reported in 2015 that food manufacturers diverted 82.4 percent of byproducts—nearly 3 million tons per year—for animal feed.
Urban juice operations, though, are typically too small to afford the cost of moving a relatively small amount of pulp to feed suppliers. Juice giant Tropicana, on the other hand, dries 700,000 tons of orange peels each year for cattle feed.
One way juicers are reducing waste is by purchasing “ugly fruit,” like multi-pronged carrots, that tend to be discarded by farmers at a rate of more than billion tons annually, ReFED reported.