Discarded oyster shells from restaurants are helping rebuild a vulnerable stretch of Louisiana’s disappearing coastline. At Grand Bayou Indian Village, volunteers used 200 tons of bagged oyster shells to create a 400-foot reef designed to protect the Indigenous community’s shoreline. Two years after the project was built, monitoring recorded a sharp increase in live oyster density, rising from 52 to 130 oysters per square metre between 2025 and 2026, according to the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL).
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