Press. Voanews.
It’s another
busy day for Tony Price, who has a list of around two dozen restaurants and
other seafood businesses to visit, to pick up discarded oyster shells. Fast and
energetic, he moves barrels of smelly shells from restaurants’ back storage
areas to his truck. “We do seven pickups a week, plus events on weekends. I’d
say we’re getting somewhere between 500 and even 800 bushels a week,” he says. That’s
the beginning of a recycling process, a journey for the oyster shell to return
to the water.
Price is the
operation manager with Shell Recycling Alliance, a program run by the Oyster
Recovery Partnership. Last year, the program collected 33,400 bushels of oyster
shells from restaurants all around the Chesapeake Bay area. Every half shell
collected becomes a new home for around 10 baby oysters.
On the menu
Oysters have
been a popular item on the menu of Mike’s Crab House since 1958. The famous
seafood restaurant, in Riva, Maryland, is one of more than 330 restaurants in
Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. that now recycle their oyster shells. Tony
Piera says he and Mike's other owners joined the program four years ago. “It’s
a win-win for us. It’s a win-win for the environment,” he explains. “Before we
did it, the trash would come and get them. Now, the Oyster Recovery comes two
days a week, picks them up.”
Mike’s Crab
House is one of the top ten contributors to the program this year, with more
822 bushels of recycled oyster shells in 2017. “I think I’m getting more
customers here because they know we recycle here," Piera says. "They
know it’s good for the environment, the Chesapeake Bay.”
Saving oysters,
saving the bay
The Oyster
Recovery Partnership began in 2010 with 22 restaurants. Spokeswoman Karis King
says the program has been well received and is expanding. “We continue to grow
and expand from us basically knocking on doors, trying to get people involved,”
she adds. “It’s turned out into getting requests every single day, ‘How do we
become part of this program?’ ‘I’m really excited about the program.’ ‘I want
to do my part.’ ‘I want to be sustainable.’”
The recycling
program offers incentives to encourage more restaurants to join. “In Maryland,
tax credits that restaurants can claim based on how many bushels they recycle.
We also provide them with support, restaurant training to talk to the servers
about what the program is and why it’s important.”
Multi-step
recycling process
Done with his
day's rounds, Tony Price heads to a facility where the first phase of the
process - cleaning the shells - begins. “The shell is taken down here, it’s
aged, it sits for about a year. It dries out, sun, wind, rain,” he explains.
“(It) kind of decomposes a little all the tissue that’s left. Behind me is the
shell washer. There are jets of a high pressure water from a pressure water
system tumbles the shells, just give it a nice cleaning. So, it comes out
brilliant white as opposed to the stuff on the other side is the raw shell.
It’s a little bit grayer.” Then, the shells go to the University of Maryland's
Center for Environmental Science Horn Point Oyster Hatchery for further
processing.
Hatchery
manager, Stephanie Alexander, says her team gets tiny baby oysters, called
spat, ready to be attached to the clean oyster shells. “We get the adult
oysters, we spawn them and create the babies. Then, we grow those baby oysters
for two to three weeks. Then they mature and we attach them to the shell to
become spat on shell.” Now firmly attached to the recycled natural shells, the
spat are put back in the Chesapeake Bay. Here, they will grow and flourish,
increasing the oyster population. Alexander says new generations of oysters are
crucially important for the health of the bay. They filter the water.
“That kind of
makes them the bay’s kidneys,” she explains. “The cleaner water you have, the
more sunlight can penetrate, the more grasses you end up having, which results
in nursery area for fish and crabs when they are small and juvenile so they
don’t get eaten. They also are spawning and reproducing, adding to the
population. They (oyster shells) create habitat for many, many creatures. They
are kind of the coral reefs of the bay.” The success of the Recycling Shell
Alliance program encourages more restaurants to join. That’s good for the bay
and for people who love to eat oysters.