When Raj Behari moved to Victoria and applied for a job at a local oyster bar, he wasn’t expecting to start a compost company.
Growing up in Saskatchewan, Behari had never thought much about oysters at all.
But when he showed up for an interview at Shuck Taylor’s bar and restaurant in downtown Victoria, owner Jess Taylor began telling him about the various ecological benefits of oysters.
From that one conversation, he was hooked.
“Within a few days, I did about 36 pages of research,” Behari said.
“I started learning that there’s so much that is possible with oysters and so much happening in other parts of the world compared to what’s happening here.”
Behari has a bachelor’s degree in biology, and his family runs a green cleaning products manufacturing business in Saskatchewan that he was involved with for a number of years.
He applied his background in the chemical industry to his research into oysters.
His family was involved in chemical manufacturing, water treatment and wastewater treatment. Calcium carbonate, which makes up about 95 per cent of oyster shells, is involved in all of those processes, Behari said.
“Nature is very intentional about what it creates. It takes energy for oysters to produce their shells, and it provides them protection, but it does a lot of these other interesting things with the ecosystem as well,” Behari said.
“So there’s all these different interesting applications for oyster shells, and currently, those are going into our waste stream here.”
Behari began collecting shells from work, bringing them home to his downtown apartment to clean them in his bathtub, and experimenting with various uses for them.
Eventually, he and Taylor began approaching cafes around Victoria to collect their spent coffee grounds and waste from the roasting process.
Behari shipped the coffee grounds, along with crushed oyster shells to Saskatchewan, where he has access to a rapid composter. From there, the material was sent to the Canadian Feed Research Centre, where it was pelletized, then sent back west.
The result of these efforts is Shellter Rapid Composting Inc., a small startup that harnesses the benefits of oyster shells to create ecologically sound products.
Their first product mixes the acidity of coffee waste with the alkaline nature of oyster shells to create a nutrient-rich soil amendment.
It’s currently being tested against regular fertilizer through a collaboration with Brooke Hayes, a PhD candidate in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, and FED Urban Agriculture, an urban farm in Vic West.
While Behari is excited about the possibilities of applying oyster shells to various on-land uses, both he and Taylor agree that a critically important use of the shells would be to put them back in the ocean.
But this, Taylor and Behari agreed, is where Canada is falling behind.
Billions of oysters, millions of dollars
In most of the oyster-growing regions of the U.S., there are medium to large-scale initiatives to return oyster shells to the ocean.
Taylor pointed to an effort that has been underway for years in the Gulf Coast, where several regional non-profits received $5 million in funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to restore oyster reefs affected by overharvesting, hurricanes and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when an estimated 134 million US gallons of oil spilled from a drilling rig into the ocean.
He also noted the Billion Oyster Project, a large-scale charity that engages mostly student volunteers from around New York to restore New York Harbor through the construction of oyster reefs in the Five Boroughs.
To date, according to their website, they’ve engaged 30,000 students, recovered 2.8 million pounds of shells, and restored 1.5 million live oysters.
There is another massive NOAA-backed initiative underway in Chesapeake Bay, and similar projects in Connecticut and Washington’s Puget Sound.
Most initiatives follow a similar process: Volunteers or employees engaged by nonprofits or businesses collect oyster shells from restaurants.
The shells are stored in massive piles in areas like landfills or unused quarries, where they’re left exposed to the elements for around six months. After that time, it’s assumed that any invasive pathogens no longer present a substantial risk to the ocean.
The shells are then returned to the ocean, where they provide a surface for free-floating oyster larvae to settle on and grow into new oysters, eventually forming a reef.
The benefits of oyster reefs are myriad.
According to NOAA’s website, they provide habitat for fish, ocean invertebrates and other shellfish. They also filter the water — one single oyster can filter nearly 200 litres of water per day — resulting in clearer oceans where seagrasses can access more sunlight. Finally, they provide storm protection by acting as natural breakwaters.
Taylor and Behari would like to see similar initiatives in B.C.
Taylor said the volume of oysters being removed from the ocean on a daily basis and dispersed to various restaurants is at such a large scale that provincial or federal investment, akin to what U.S organizations have received, would be necessary to meaningfully tackle recycling the shells.
“We’re averaging 4-5,000 [oysters] a week right now, which is a really big number for a 50-seat restaurant,” said Taylor, who estimates that shells make up one-third of his restaurant’s waste stream — and they’re just one small restaurant.
He also pointed to oyster farmers like Fanny Bay Oysters near Courtenay, or Evening Cove Oysters in Nanaimo, that shuck some of their product on-farm, resulting in massive shell piles.
Fanny Bay has been crushing some of its shell pile to sell it as a soil amendment, chicken feed and miscellaneous landscaping products since 2015, according to Malindi Taylor, one of the owners of the Taylor family-run farm. (No relation to Jess Taylor)
But there are no large-scale initiatives to return the shells to the water.
An ‘overly cautious’ approach to shell reef restoration
In Canada, it isn’t just a lack of funding that prevents oyster reef rebuilding from taking place at scale, it’s policy.
Oysters are managed by the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which has fairly strict regulations around returning shells to the ocean to reduce the spread of pathogens.
Malindi Taylor said DFO has in the past approached her family, who harvest oysters from several different bays, asking them to reduce the size of their shell pile, since it was beginning to encroach on the water.
“They don’t want shells from other areas ending up in a new bay,” she said.
Dr. Timothy Green, the Canada Research Chair in shellfish health and genomics at Vancouver Island University, said that while he appreciates DFO’s concerns when it comes to invasive-species management, its overly cautious approach to shell reef restoration is holding up B.C.’s progress in work many people consider critical.
Green says healthy shellfish habitats are not only important for water filtration, natural breakwater formation, and supporting other sea life, but oysters and bivalves are a sustainable, ethical protein source, a robust part of the economy, as well as an important element of First Nations food sovereignty.
However, much of the marine restoration work on the coast is “very salmon-fixated,” Green said, and a framework or set of policies focused on shellfish-habitat restoration just doesn’t exist.
“The DFO has been very, very cautious to provide permits to do that kind of research,” he said, suggesting the fisheries department has become overly cautious as a result of lawsuits.
He says there are many unanswered questions around the impact of large-scale reef restoration in B.C. — especially considering the reality that many of the shells being used to restore reefs, if they were from restaurants, would be coming not only from different bays in B.C., but from as far away as P.E.I.
Green said there are concerns about how introducing shells from non-native species would affect native species.
On the West Coast, a native oyster called the Olympia has been largely decimated due to decades of overharvesting and is now being crowded out by the introduced Pacific oyster.
“If you put out all the Pacific shells, did that create a Pacific reef where you might not want one?” Green said.
“But at the end of the day, you know, I think it would be better to at least have marine bivalves, healthy communities filtering the water, and all the positive benefits that come [rather] than a lot of our tidal flats that have been over-fished and are not healthy anymore.”
Christopher Harley, a UBC marine ecologist, believes the risks of shell re-introduction are manageable, and the goals are worth pursuing.
Harley, who researches marine species and how climate change and invasive species will affect intertidal environments, said moving oyster shells around can also move unwanted species and bacteria around, like invasive green crabs, or pathogens like Vibrio.
“I think DFO would rightly be a little bit worried about taking a whole bunch of shells from a Vancouver restaurant and dropping it off here in town in False Creek,” he said.
However, Harley said the potential benefits of habitat restoration should outweigh the concerns, adding methods such as those employed in the U.S., where the shells are left out in the elements for six months to a year, would likely be sufficient to reduce the risk of pathogen spread.
“That seems reasonable to me as a way of clearing any little bad actors that might be hiding in the shells. The other thing is, we could absolutely test whether my intuition on that is correct by just, you know, swabbing things and sequencing,” Harley said.
“DFO monitors for all sorts of things all the time, and this could just be another thing that goes into that pipeline.”
Like Green, Harley believes DFO is working from an overabundance of caution born out of fear.
“You’re weighing the risk of accidentally introducing a disease, and nobody wants to be responsible for having signed the paperwork that allowed that to happen,” he said.
As for concerns about the Pacific oyster crowding out the native Olympia, Harley believes an invasive oyster is better than no oysters at all.
“I personally have come to terms with it not being native,” he said. “We’re never going to get back to what the shoreline looked like in 1850.”
The DFO did not provide a response to questions from the Times Colonist after several weeks of requests.
Millennia of Indigenous management
A 2005 study published in the journal Nature Communications found that Indigenous oyster farming persisted for millennia in North America and Australia.
The study found that, in contrast to “the 17th-20th century capitalist commercial fisheries that decimated many keystone species, including oysters,” coastal Indigenous communities farmed oysters intensively, sometimes to the point of surplus production, for at least 5,000 and up to 10,000 years.
Included in these farming practices was the construction of shell middens and the return of shells to the beach to provide a substrate for oyster larvae to attach to.
The study indicates that oysters were woven into broader cultural, ritual and social traditions, and that effective stewardship of oyster reefs must include co-developing strategies for restoration and harvest with Indigenous communities.
Blaine Wilson, a fisher, hunter and member of the Tsartlip First Nation, said their traditional harvest practices, which they still employ today, include returning shells to the beach to help the local ecosystem.
Wilson said wild foods are “medicine for the people,” and play a much broader role in First Nations society than simple sustenance. “We send out food to the jails, we send it to people who have nobody, because it leads you back to your family,” he said. “It’s really strong stuff.”
The Tsartlip are one of 11 nations that Parks Canada and the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve are currently working in partnership with to restore sea gardens.
The restoration project supports Indigenous technology around sea gardening, which largely involves the construction of rock walls that create space for clams to grow.
While Parks Canada is working on sea gardens, there is no initiative underway specifically dedicated to oyster reef rehabilitation.
Oysters for the people
Back at Shuck Taylor’s, Taylor and Behari point to what they perceive to be some of the biggest challenges in creating a robust oyster-shell recycling eco-system in B.C., both for returning shells to the ocean and their on-land applications.
To Taylor, much of the problem stems from a lack of social concern that results in a lack of investment, which he believes could be combatted by building more of a culture around oysters.
“Oyster farms are in these beautiful locations that are sometimes off the beaten path,” he said, noting that interesting work is going on in plain sight, but nobody’s looking.
“They’re kind of separate from society in a way. Maybe if there was more tourism and more awareness, I think maybe that would have an impact.”
Behari also noted that oyster-shell recycling initiatives are both capital- and labour-intensive, requiring space, machinery and sometimes just pure strength.
“There’s this lack of entrepreneurs that have actually followed through and struggled through it, and it’s, I’m assuming, just because it’s hard,” he said.
In making the business happen, Behari has relied heavily on the infrastructure and connections he has in Saskatchewan.
He said he has been routinely frustrated throughout this process when he reaches out to larger institutions and government and never hears back.
“I know some of the people I’ve reached out to, if they were more engaged in helping make this come to life, we would be further along the road,” he said.
Green from Vancouver Island University noted that, just down the coast in Washington, oyster restoration is considered big business and a win-win on the political spectrum, and therefore worthy of investment.
Oysters are a multi-billion-dollar industry globally, and healthy marine eco-systems produce economic returns for other industries, such as commercial and sport fishing.
“Generally everywhere else, it’s seen as a really positive way to go and invest money into improving our natural habitats,” Green said.
“But British Columbia seems to be somewhat of a challenge to move forward. We’re just kind of outliers in this, and we really need to catch up.”
