Ed's Seafood Shed Joins the Oyster Shell Recycling Program

SPANISH FORT, Ala. (November 29, 2016) - Ed’s Seafood Shed has become the latest local restaurant to join the Alabama Coastal Foundation’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program. The Eastern Shore Chamber of Commerce helped them celebrate this new program with a ribbon cutting at their restaurant Tuesday, November 29.

Restaurants are donating the oyster shells they would normally throw away and the program is now putting that important resource back into Alabama waters so they can help new oysters grow.

Once the shells are collected, they are stored outside for about six months. The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources then loads them onto barges and puts the shells back into restoration areas.

In addition to being an incredible local seafood dish, oysters contribute a great deal to the ecosystem -- improving water quality, providing habitats for other animals and limiting erosion on our shorelines.

Funding for the Oyster Shell Recycling Program came from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation as part of the Gulf Coast Conservation Grants Program. The grant funds the first two years of the project and then it will be self-sustaining.

The project is being led by the Alabama Coastal Foundation which has created an advisory committee of restaurant owners and chefs in addition to representatives from the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, The Nature Conservancy, Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium and the Mobile Bay Oyster Gardening Program.

The recycling program first launched this fall along the Mobile Bay Causeway. The project will expand to restaurants in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach this spring.

Click here to see the restaurants currently participating.

If you are a restaurant interested in participating, contact Mark Berte, ACF’s executive director by emailing him at mberte@joinACF.org or calling (251) 990-6002.

For more information on the Oyster Shell Recycling program visit joinACF.org