Don’t be a piesang, take your peels home with you

Posted by David Henning on 30 September 2021

What do you do when your friend takes out some fruit, removes the peel and flings it into the bush alongside the trail? Well, you should probably pick it up and tell your friend that that naartjie peel will still be there in a year.

Once you know what happens to the food scraps you’ve left behind, you won’t do it again. Sure, you tell yourself ‘it’s organic waste,’ ‘it’s natural’ or ‘it’s biodegradable’ but that banana peel or raisin can cause more damage than you think.

Many hikers don’t seem to realise that it may take years for food waste to decompose. An apple could take two months to decompose, but a banana or citrus peel can take as long as two years.

Not only is this strewn waste an eyesore along the trail, but it also endangers wildlife, and potentially us. An animal’s sense of smell is much more advanced than ours, meaning they will be attracted to scraps, as innocuous as a banana peel may seem.

Some mountainous neighbourhoods of the country already have issues with baboons sneaking into homes, it would be adverse for baboons to associate hikers with free pickings. This is what biologists call attraction behaviour, which refers to human actions that cause animals to overcome their natural wariness of people.

One apple core won’t disrupt the local ecosystem, but cumulatively, this could affect the resident animals health and eventually alters their behaviour. If an animal finds human food consistently over time, it will no longer seek food in nature.

This is how long some scraps can survive on a trail:

  • Paper bag – 1 month
  • Apple core – 8 weeks
  • Orange peel and banana skins – 2 years
  • Cigarette end – 18 months to 500 years
  • Plastic bag – 10 to 20 years
  • A plastic bottle – 450 years
  • Chewing gum – 1 million years

A question to ask yourself before chucking something into the bushes is: ‘would this item be here if I wasn’t?’ As vital as it is to get out into nature, it is more important to leave no trace.

Picture: Unsplash

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