Ramping Up Our Shell Recycling with The Fulton Fish Market Cooperative
/Reopened, legendary seafood empire – The Fulton Fish Market Cooperative becomes our next shell transfer station, supporting Billion Oyster Project in scaling up the Shell Recycling Program.
“The Fulton Fish Market Cooperative is proud to partner with Billion Oyster Project in support of their Shell Recycling Program. Our partnership is fundamental to making our shared vision of clean waterways, community education, and sustainability a reality.”
Managing the collection and recycling process of oyster shells across New York City for our restoration work isn’t (and doesn’t even sound) easy. From the restaurant to the reef, each step is a crucial cog in our effort to turn a single half-shell on your plate into a new home for 20 juvenile oysters, and divert what would otherwise be waste (2.5 million pounds of it and counting) from our city’s landfills. The shell transfer station is one of those hidden cogs — where shells picked up around the city accumulate for a month before we transport them to Governors Island.
Four times a week, our shell recycling truck, operated by The Lobster Place Wholesale in The Bronx, visits 15 to 20 restaurants daily across New York City. Boris, our main collection driver, walks into each kitchen or scrap storage area, and grabs our collection buckets and/or bins. He dumps the shells into the truck and delivers a day's collection to our shell transfer containers — formerly located in Greenpoint, now far more conveniently located in Hunts Point, where he left that morning, thanks to our new partnership with The Fulton Fish Market Cooperative.
Every month, or when the transfer containers fill up, we transport them to our shell pile on Governors Island (a.k.a Billion Oyster Project’s headquarters), where they’ll undergo a one-year curing process before being cleaned and placed into restoration structures that will enter New York Harbor.
Dumpster containers filled with a days collection of shell waste from nyc’s restaurants, outside the fulton fish market COOPERATIVE
“By moving our shell recycling transfer station to the Fulton Fish Market, which is the same neighborhood where our shell collection truck lives, we remove a daily detour that tacked on an hour or more of travel and emissions each day. In that freed-up time, we can fit in anywhere from 2-5 more stops in an 8-hour work shift, allowing us to bring more restaurants into the program, and the demand is stronger now than before”
As we scale up to our goal of restoring 100 million oysters a year, partnerships that help us tackle the challenges of working in a dense urban landscape, particularly the lack of appropriate and lasting access to space, are equally vital to annual funding. Even better, they remind us that environmental action is cooperative by nature,; involving virtually every industry, from seafood distributors to bankers on Wall St, and the individuals within them who share our values. As we work to restore one billion oysters to New York City and foster a reconnection between New Yorkers and their waterfront, it just makes sense to do it with the Fulton Fish Market Cooperative, experts in cultivating that historical connection for the last 150 years.
Furthering a century’s work of connection to nature, together.
For over two centuries, the Fulton Fish Market was the cornerstone of New York City’s seafood industry.
SOUTH Street and fulton street, manhattan. Circa 1928. from the new york historical society’s Subway construction photograph collection’, 1900-1950, created by New York (N.Y.). Board of Transportation Independent City-Owned Subway System,
Older than the Empire State Building (constructed in 1931) and the Brooklyn Bridge (completed in 1883), this iconic seafood hub began, like many New York businesses, small and focused on serving the South Street Seaport community. It quickly became a vital link between the city and its waterways, employing thousands of immigrants who brought diverse seafood traditions to the area. By the late 19th century, it had become the nation’s largest fish and seafood wholesale market.
During this time of growth, the market helped establish New York City as the “oyster capital of the world.”. Oysters were abundant, affordable, and enjoyed by New Yorkers across all social classes, thanks to the oyster stands and saloons within the market. By the late 1880s, the market had become the main distribution center for oysters in New York City, employing over 200,000 people, including shuckers, freight boat operators, blacksmiths, and more.
As New York City grew into a global capital, the narrow streets and outdated facilities of The Seaport could no longer support modern seafood distribution needs. After 180 years in this location, the Fulton Fish Market reopened and relocated to Hunts Point in the South Bronx in 2005, joining a community of food wholesalers on the city’s edge in restoring our ocean to table – and now, back to the ocean – dining culture through food waste initiatives like our Shell Recycling Program.
Big things come in small packages (or dumpsters)
Sometimes, the small things, like sharing property, make major change possible. By providing us with space for two 20-foot transfer dumpsters, The Fulton Fish Market Cooperative’s parking lot sees 25,000 pounds of shells enter and leave the site each month. That’s enough repurposed calcium carbonate to seed roughly 400,000 oyster larvae.
Over the next decade, it will be relationships built on increasing efficiency and shared ethos that allows us to expand our Shell Recycling Program to more restaurants, divert more waste, and turn desolate harbor floors into the thriving estuary it once was. As we search for our next source of funding for our waste mitigation initiative wrapped in a restoration project, there’s ample room for collaboration.
Learn more about our work - 10 years to today, and what’s ahead.
Help support the effort simply by dining with our restaurant partners, making a recurring donation, or reaching out to build something together. We can’t take care of our commons alone!
Written by Robertson Flores, 2024 Billion Oyster Project Research Associate Intern
