By Julia Robins, Staff Writer
Two customers walk into a restaurant and order a tray of oysters. To them, they’ve simply enjoyed a delicious meal.
“What they don’t realize they’ve done is they’ve supported the industry, they’ve supported restoration,” says Todd Janeski, self-described “oyster geek” and director of the Virginia Oyster Shell Recycling Program and staff at Virginia Commonwealth University. “They’ve basically made a passive subconscious decision to help the [Chesapeake] Bay.”
In 2013, Janeski launched a pilot version of the shell reclamation program in Richmond. In less than one year, nearly 20 restaurants, businesses, state and local government offices, and non-governmental organizations joined the effort. Now, Janeski asks, “How do we replicate what we’re doing in Richmond in another town?”
With funding from Virginia Sea Grant, the program has expanded to Charlottesville. Like any locality, says Janeski, Charlottesville “has its own challenges,” like finding a dumpster in which to store the shell, a storage site for the dumpster, and someone to haul the shell from Charlottesville to Richmond or Gloucester Point. “Those have been the big challenges for us that I did not expect,” he explains. But overall, “It’s going really well.”
Virginia’s oyster harvest has dwindled over the years, making available shell hard to find. Many oyster restoration projects must use clamshell or crushed concrete for oysters to attach to instead. The state government has invested millions of dollars to harvest fossilized oyster shell from the James River to support restoration. But as James Wesson of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission stated in a recent Bay Journal interview, “the James River stores won’t last forever.”
Oyster shell recycling by restaurants and other local businesses is an easy way to supply the shell needed to help restore wild, native oysters to the Chesapeake Bay. Rather than tossing shell into the trash, these businesses can recycle it to the restoration projects, providing a natural hard surface for new oysters to attach to and grow.
In Charlottesville, individuals and businesses are eager to help support the Bay. As an inland town, “they don’t see the Chesapeake Bay, but they recognize the value of what they’re doing locally,” Janeski says—especially the restaurant owners. “They’re excited. They get it. They’re anxious to get going, which is really exciting to me.”
To ensure that everything runs smoothly, the Charlottesville branch of the program has a number of volunteers from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Master Naturalists, and University of Virginia. Volunteers do everything from collecting and transporting shells, to referring new restaurants to the program, to coming up with marketing and outreach ideas.
Currently, collected shell goes into the Lafayette River to aid restoration efforts. Janeski hopes to soon add shell as well to the Piankatank River, where a large-scale restoration effort and Virginia Commonwealth University research projects are taking place. In all, the program supports oyster restoration in 10 Virginia bodies of water identified in the Oyster Restoration Master Plan, a US Army Corps of Engineers strategic document for large-scale oyster restoration throughout the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.
“I want our program to be geographically diverse,” says Janeski. That greater range will help connect more people to restoration efforts and the oyster industry as a whole. So far, Janeski has met people from Harrisonburg to Kilmarnock to Hampton Roads who are eager to coordinate and get involved.
