On the terrace of a seafood restaurant in Houston, Texas’s largest city, a few ladies are enjoying a local oyster dish: the breaded mollusks are slathered in mayonnaise and served in a sandwich.
Sitting in the shade of a palm tree on a warm winter’s day, the diners have no idea that behind the restaurant a woman is busy giving the shells a second life.
Thanks to Shannon Batte, they will soon form part of a reef in Galveston Bay, 10 kilometers away. Out of sight, the Galveston Bay Foundation employee loads seven trash cans each weighing 80 kilograms on to her trailer.
The cans are full of not just oyster shells but also water, discarded oyster forks and squeezed lemons. All y…
Keep on reading: Oyster shells given new life as reefs off Texas coast