Why you shouldn’t ditch your apple cores in the woods
Fresh fruits such as apples, oranges, and bananas make great hiking snacks: they’re self-contained bundles of nutritious goodness that travel well on the trail. But these delicious snacks often get left discarded in the woods or even thrown from a vehicle window during a long road trip. Read on to find out why that’s not a good thing!
fruit takes a long time to decompose
Apple cores and orange and banana peels are some of the most common waste items left behind. Because they’re considered to be biodegradable, many people believe it is okay to leave them behind after a snack break. The problem is, these items can sometimes take years to decompose, depending on the environment, leaving more opportunities for them to be found and eaten by animals.
Why is that a problem? Often, these cores and peels are left in environments where they would not be found naturally, meaning that the animals living there have not evolved to be able to process these foods and could actually end up being harmed by ingesting them.
Additionally, leaving food scraps of any kind, even biodegradable scraps, helps to habituate wildlife to humans and leads to dependence on human food waste for survival, which can turn negative for both human and animal very fast.
So next time you sit down on the trail for a snack, do the right thing! Pack out your food scraps!
Parker Outside 