From 2020 through 2023, the state of Mississippi ran a shell collection and recycling pilot program that redirected discarded shells from Gulf Coast restaurants and put them back into the water as cultch, which is the hard material that young oysters use to cling to in order to grow. The pilot program was conducted under the initiative “Save Our Shells,” and helped solve an issue which had gone unnoticed in the Gulf region: as the industry shifted away from centralized shucking toward selling live oysters directly to restaurants, the resulting shells became scattered across many small locations rather than concentrated at a few processing plants, leaving them a largely uncollected resource.
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