June 19, 2013 — Each week diners slurp down more than 1,200 dozen oysters at Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C., and the 13 other surrounding area restaurants owned by Clyde’s Restaurant Group. Until recently, all those oyster shells were tossed in the trash and hauled off to the nearest landfill. These days, like a growing number of restaurants, the company recycles its shells.
“The main reason we do it is because we’re such a large user of the resource,” said Bart Farrell, director of food and beverage for Clyde’s Restaurant Group. “It’s really in our best interest.”
The move to recycle shells is being driven by a growing number of nonprofit groups dedicated to restoring oyster reefs and rebuilding the oyster population, which have been diminished in recent decades by overfishing and degraded water quality, among other factors.
One of the organizations leading the movement is the Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP), an Annapolis, MD-based nonprofit dedicated to “shellfish restoration, aquaculture and wild fishery activities to protect our environment, support our economy and preserve our cultural heritage.” In 2010, ORP launched the Shell Recycling Alliance to reclaim the thousands of shells being tossed into the trash by restaurants and catering companies and return them to the sea to be used as a home for spat (baby oysters) and to plant back in the Chesapeake Bay and tributaries.
“We realized very quickly we were going to run out of shell [and there was] no model for collecting shells from restaurants on a large scale,” said ORP executive director Stephan Abel of the creation of the Shell Recycling Alliance.
Read the full story at Nation's Restaurant News