Your shucked oysters could help shore up the Orange County coast

It’s well before the lunch hour when a worker lugs a large plastic storage bin out of the kitchen at the Bluewater Grill in Newport Beach and into the back of Kaysha Kenney ’s minivan.

The bin is full of discarded oyster shells from the previous night’s dinner service, plus some lemons and half-eaten bread. Kenney wants the shells, but the extra food bits are OK, she said, “because they sit out in a field and they have little animals that will come and kind of pick off the food scraps.”

This pickup is the first phase of a project led by Kenney’s group Orange County Coastkeeper . The goal is to use oyster shells from local restaurants to restore the once-abundant oyster beds along the coast and buffer the shoreline from erosion and rising seas.

Though the shells Kenney co