You may love the taste, but probably not the waste when it comes to eating oysters, but now a restoration project is coming full circle.
Collective Oyster Recycling and Restoration, or CORR, has been collecting discarded oyster shells for nearly a year. Now, the non-profit returned hundreds of thousands of shells to the ocean for the very first time.
They came from the ocean floor and to the ocean floor they are returned.
Instead of hitting a landfill, all of the shells are now in Long Island Sound, the team’s first ever shell dump taking place over six days at the end of May.
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“Doing this for the first time in the State of Connecticut feels amazing. Today's like our big day,” Tim Macklin, CORR Co-Founder, said.
The CORR team has been recycling oyster shells in Fairfield for eight years. Last year, the non-profit got a grant from the Department of Agriculture to expand that program across Connecticut for the first time.
The volume of shells increased exponentially after going statewide.
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“It took maybe seven years to get half the pile that we have gotten in seven months,” said Todd Koehnke, CORR Co-Founder.
Since last July, Tim Macklin, Todd Koehnke, and Eric Victor have been collecting discarded shells from wholesalers and restaurants
“These would have come from a raw bar, where we pick these up in the buckets,” Koehnke said.
The shells have been disinfecting at a curing site for at least six months.
Now, finally, they are ready to be returned to the Sound. It is physical work, transporting thousands of shells to Milford, then piling them onto commercial fishing boats.
“We have our shell that we've collected from all the restaurants,” Eric Victor, CORR Co-Founder, said. “Getting it on and off the boat and the whole operation, I'm very tired.”
The effort supports several local fishermen, who receive a payment to take the loads out to sea.
The effort is all about restoring the oyster population. When oysters spawn, the babies attach to hard shells to grow. And CORR is returning 125,000 pounds of hard shells to Long Island Sound.
Beyond bolstering a healthy oyster population, it feeds to Connecticut economy, quite literally.
“In many instances, we will be dumping shell right out from where you're dining on that patio,” Koehnke said.
The project also aims to safeguard the environment. Oyster reefs protect the coast from storm surges and create habitats for other marine life.
“All the shells provide a home for all the other little sea creatures,” Koehnke said.
Oysters are key for water quality as well, since one adult will filter 50 gallons of water a day.
“The more oysters you grow, the more water we can filter and keep Long Island Sound a clean and healthy environment,” Macklin said.
Yet the team says the hard work is far from done, when the idea is to turn around a century of removing oyster shells from the ocean floor into a century of putting them back.
“The goal is to keep this going well into the future,” Macklin said. “This needs to happen for a long time. It seems like a lot of shell, but when you go out on Long Island Sound, you realize how much shell you need to really to make a difference.”
Proving that protecting the environment is possible, when the world is your oyster.