Louisiana's coastline is rapidly deteriorating. A nonprofit is teaming up with restaurants to rebuild it using recycled oyster shells.

• Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana collects used oyster shells to create living shorelines.
• The organization partners with around 20 restaurants and pitches it as an opportunity to give back.
• Getting staff on board by explaining and inviting them to see the program is key to its success.

Louisiana's coastline is one of the fastest disappearing places on the planet, but a local network of environmentalists and restaurants is trying to save it.

In 2014, community nonprofit Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL) launched the first oyster-shell recycling program in the state by partnering with 20 well-known New Orleans restaurants to take away shells and use them to restore coastal habitats.

Kellyn LaCour-Conant, restoration programs director at CRCL, told Insider that to date, the volunteer scheme has recycled over 70,000 sacks of shells, or 10 million pounds.

"Using those cured recycled shells, we create oyster reefs - or living shorelines - to protect wetlands from wave erosion and shoreline erosion, which then also creates an oyster-reef habitat to support our fisheries," she said.

Making it easy for partners to give back to their local area

Louisiana produces approximately one-third of the nation's oysters. It also has the highest rate of wetlands loss in the country, accounting for 80% of the nation's coastal wetland loss - an estimated 1,900 square miles since 1932.

LaCour-Conant said that environmental problems are widely understood in New Orleans. CRCL's program is designed to make it easy for businesses to give back.

"Providing an opportunity where all the restaurant owners have to do is throw their oyster shells into a different receptacle is an easy sell," she said. The nonprofit provides special recycling bins and coordinates pickup.

"They don't have to bring them anywhere or do anything - they just put them in a designated bin and leave them out for our recycling contractor," she added.

When identifying partners, CRCL looks for New Orleans restaurants that benefit from the city's substantial tourism trade, which also sees a high demand for oysters.

Cost is generally the most prohibitive factor for sustainability programs

The only pushback they receive, LaCour-Conant said, is that it's cheaper and easier to just throw the shells in the trash.

The average cost for the program is $85 per month for three containers collected three times per week, with the maximum cost for daily collections capped at $160 per month.

Using this feedback from smaller eateries, CRCL has recently started partnering with the Chef's Brigade, a mutual-aid organization for the service industry, which helps to subsidize the cost for some restaurants.

"Another benefit is that we also really push marketing for our partner restaurants," LaCour-Conant said. "When we host events, we try to book our partners for catering. We also produce different media and feature them as much as we can. We want to create the sense that not only are they investing in a sustainable future, but they're getting perks for partnering with us."

LaCour-Conant added that the strong local branding of CRCL helps sell the partnership as an opportunity, and many restaurants tout the association and use it as the basis of their corporate sustainability action plans.

Creating an oyster-lovers ecosystem

LaCour-Conant said CRCL ensures the partnerships are "a mutual exchange" and that they use any opportunity to learn from each other.

"We coordinate preshift meetings and go out to our restaurant partners and make sure that staff members know what's going on with oyster shells, they're not just chucking them in the bin. It's important that they understand the process," she said.

CRCL reminds staff that they have standing invitations to come out to the volunteer events and do flyovers of the coast to understand the problem, not just the solution they're offering.

There, they can meet with another pillar of the partnership, local coastal communities including Native American tribes, to build the reefs so they protect culturally significant sites such as mounds.

"We use every point of engagement as an opportunity to learn from our restaurant partners, our oystermen, and our fishery experts because they are the ones dealing with oysters every day," LaCour-Conant said.