If you eat oysters on the half shell in Southeast Louisiana restaurants in the future, you will be helping to save our state’s valuable Gulf of Mexico coast in the future.
Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana in cooperation with the Nature Conservancy and a dozen of our finest oyster restaurants in the area have started a recycling project that offers us much hope.
Bins of discarded oyster shells, from which the oysters have been eaten at the restaurants, will be picked up and taken to a site in Buras where they will be cured.
And then they will be turned into reefs along the shores of the Gulf, which will provide a solid place for oysters to attach and help protect the marshland behind them.This amounts to man helping Mother Nature grow itself. Such projects are what we need for our future.
In the past, oyster shells were tossed into landfills where they served no purpose at all.
In the future, they will help keep the tides destroying our shoreline away and it will help our coast grow.
Some 800 tons of oyster shells are already reported awaiting use in an oyster reef along Lake Athanosio in St. Bernard Parish. Nature Conservancy has already built more than four miles of shoreline with reefs in Southeast Louisiana.
There are many ways we can help protect our threatened coast and this is one of them. Hopefully, many more such bright ideas will come about to help us keep our coast healthy in the time to come.
Be the first to comment