Science Scene - Oyster Shell Recycling

Recycling, it turns out, is not reserved for inanimate objects. An increasingly popular Chesapeake Bay program is sending oyster shells collected from restaurants, which save the shells from customers' meals, back into the bay, where they form homes for new oysters.

Oysters have been harvested to dangerously low levels.  Oysters also serve as natural water filters— on oyster capable of filtering four gallons of water per hour.

So an alliance formed that began collecting shells from local restaurants and returning them to the bay. Now one year old, the Oyster Recovery Partnership Shell Recycling Alliance has at least 50 participating establishments in the Maryland-Virgina-DC area and has collected nearly two million oyster shells in that short time—enough to plant potentially more than 20 million oysters back into the bay in the next year.

Sounds like a win-win to me.