Researchers have witnessed incredible results after dumping 30 truckloads of coffee pulp, a waste product of the coffee industry, onto an area of degraded former farmland in Costa Rica. Marking out a control area of a similar size, they were astounded by the change over the next two years. Dr. Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study—which was published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence—described the change as “dramatic.” “The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years,” Cole said, according to a press release, “while the control plot remained dominated by nonnative pasture grasses.” In 2018, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawai’i covered a 35-by-40-meter area on a former coffee farm in Coto Brus county, southern Costa Rica, which had undergone rapid deforestation in the 1950s, with a half-meter thick layer of the coffee pulp as part …