Shucked, slurped, recycled: How the oyster you just ate might help the next generation of oysters

Into buckets they go, night after night, the Cape May Salts, the Blue Points, and the Wellfleets — thousands of oysters shucked, slurped, and hauled out to the trash cans behind Dock’s Oyster House.

Before 2020, the Atlantic City seafood institution simply tossed oyster shells in the garbage along with the napkins, cocktail straws, and shrimp tails, then off to the dump it all went.

On a recent summer afternoon at the 127-year-old restaurant, executive chef Stephan Johnson hauled a five-gallon bucket of oyster shells out back and dumped them into a bright green recycling can bearing the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection logo. The leftover oyster shells weren’t going to be buried in a landfill or turned into concrete but sent back to the waterways, where they will help future generations of oysters thrive.

Oysters take two to three years to reach maturity, but spend their first two weeks as free-swimming, unprotected larvae, looking for old shells to attach themselves to and eventually build into reefs. Taking oysters out of the water without replacing the shells depletes waterways of their habitats, and can negatively affect the health of an oyster population.

“I like to say that the oysters have been good to us,” Johnson said, “so we’re good to the oyster.”

The shell recycling program began in 2019, after Atlantic City’s Hard Rock Hotel & Casino reached out to the NJDEP about recycling shells. “They were humble beginnings,” Scott Stueber, an NJDEP fisheries biologist, said at an Atlantic County research station on an early July afternoon. “We started by literally loading and off-loading shells at the back of pickup trucks.”

Today, the NJDEP has 11 restaurant partners, including Dock’s and the Borgata Hotel Casino — and a larger vehicle that does weekly pickups of dozens of recycling cans from restaurants and casinos in Atlantic County. So far this year, the agency has collected 100 tons of shells from restaurants.

Many regions across the United States have laid claim to being the “oyster capital of the world,” including Washington and Florida. Historically, towns such as Port Norris and Bivalve, along the Delaware Bay in Cumberland County, have also competed for the title. The Mullica River and Great Bay oyster population is one of the last self-sustaining oyster populations on the Atlantic coast of New Jersey, Stueber said.

On a weekday afternoon in early July, restaurant workers, along with NJDEP officials, biologists, and fishermen, came to the Nacote Creek Research Station, in Port Republic, Atlantic County, to watch the final stage of the shell recycling program play out — putting the shells back into the water to form oyster beds.

“None of this would be possible without all of you,” Stueber said.

Down by the creek, a barge sat piled about eight feet high with thousands of oyster shells, waiting to be towed out into the brackish Mullica River, near the mouth of the Great Bay. The shells, once collected, sit for six months, a curing process meant to rid them of potential diseases that can be harmful to native oyster populations.

Deborah Pellegrino, the Borgata’s executive director chef, was one of the restaurant workers who took the boat ride out to watch the shell recycling on the river. She said about four of the casino’s 16 restaurants serve oysters, and last year, its first in the program, donated more than 18 tons of shells. “I’m proud we’re able to participate and it’s exciting to see it in action out here,” Pellegrino said. “To see the oysters going back to their oyster beds, we’re not just saying it, we’re doing it.”

Once in position over oyster bed areas, water cannons sprayed the shells and they tumbled over the side, covering the bottom of the bay with the hard base the larvae need to grow. “It’s basically a two-acre plot and they’ll go back and forth until they cover it,” said Les Frie, an NJDEP biologist.

The burgeoning oyster industry in New Jersey needs so much shell to grow oysters that NJDEP still has to supplement the shells it is getting from restaurants by buying some in bulk, Stueber said. (Clam and oyster shells are readily available as a common landscaping product in coastal communities all over the country.) The shell recycling program is expanding south, too, hoping to connect with the slew of seafood restaurants in Cape May County such as the Lobster House, one of America’s busiest restaurants. “We’re hoping to get an additional 15 restaurant partners over the next three years so if you’re interested, reach out to us,” he said.

Back at Dock’s Oyster House, patrons began lining up outside of the restaurant 30 minutes before it opened on a Friday. Raw bar chef Sopy Aguilar, the restaurant’s best shucker, said prying open the shells takes practice. “Practice and a good knife,” he said.

Oysters were stacked high in icy boxes back in the kitchen, waiting for Aguilar. Johnson said they’d probably all be gone by night’s end, then out into the recycling cans.

“We serve raw. We serve roasted. We serve fried. You name it,” Johnson said. “Now we recycle oysters, too.”