Restaurateur Brad Lomax never thought much about the oyster shells his patrons discarded after eating the decadent meat inside. A lifelong surf enthusiast and owner of four eateries in Corpus Christi, including Water Street Oyster Bar, Lomax didn’t worry about the oyster shells until his waste management bills started skyrocketing in the late 2000s.
“The price of diesel was through the roof, and we were getting significant surcharges on our dumpster bills because of the weight we had in there—and the lion’s share of our weight was oyster shells,” Lomax says.
Tough like cement and a bit ugly, oyster shells typically make their way to landfills, where they take years to decompose.
Lomax was still thinking about his bottom line when he took a walk with his neighbor, Joe Fox, one evening in 2009. The sage words Fox, a senior fellow at the Harte Research
