The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has partnered with the Sysco Corporation to expand the state’s program that uses seafood shells recycled from restaurants for creation of oyster reefs. The reefs can improve the ecological health of coastal waters, reduce waste to landfills, enhance climate resilience and benefit local restaurants.
The collaboration builds on the company’s similar efforts elsewhere to restore oyster reefs, which can play an important role in maintaining and enhancing healthy coastal ecosystems.
Through this partnership, Sysco, the world’s largest food distributor, will collect discarded oyster and clam shells from restaurants it serves across the region and provide them to NJDEP Fish & Wildlife’s Shell Recycling Program for oyster reef enhancement projects that could potentially expand to multiple sites along the state’s coastline.
Sysco’s collection efforts significantly broaden the NJDEP’s Shell Recycling program, making participation accessible to many restaurants and businesses across the state that are currently beyond the program’s reach.
The additional shells will directly result in more planted reefs, which means more available habitat for oyster larvae to settle and grow – leading to greater recruitment, population recovery and ecosystem benefits. More shells will also allow NJDEP to expand reef enhancement work to other areas, with hopes of creating reef habitat connectivity across the state’s coastal waters.
The Seeds of Partnership
Early in their lifecycle, oyster larvae need to attach to a hard substrate to develop. Clean oyster and clam shells are the preferred substrate. Traditionally, when oysters and clams are served at a restaurant, the discarded shell will be put in the trash and sent to a landfill. Shell recycling is a practice that aims to collect what otherwise would be a waste product and beneficially reuse it for oyster reef enhancement efforts.
Shell resources are quite limited, presenting a challenge to effectively implementing reef enhancement projects. To address this, NJDEP Fish & Wildlife launched a shell recycling program in 2019 that was centered in Atlantic City, where discarded clam and oyster shells from restaurants were collected and reused to enhance local oyster reefs.
The program began with a single restaurant partner and was initially focused solely on the Atlantic City region. The program grew quickly to involve nearly every major casino and seafood restaurant in Atlantic City within just a few years.
It now serves 32 restaurant partners across Atlantic, Cape May and Ocean counties, significantly increasing shell collection efforts and resulting in more available shell for oyster reef enhancement. Since 2021, more than 45,000 bushels (more than 1,100 tons) of recycled shells along with shells purchased from local processors have been planted onto the reef system.
The success of the program has drawn interest locally as well as nationally. Sysco Corporation learned of this initiative and inquired about partnership opportunities, as the program aligns with the company’s overall mission and sustainability goals.
Published December 2025