The News Journal du lieu suivant : Wilmington, Delaware • Page 18

A18 SUNDAY NEWS JOURNAL JAN. 16, 2011 REGION COVER STORY delawareonline.com Restaurants help bring back Chesapeake oysters Region's shuckers contribute thousands of shells to reseeding program Ps actually in the water. The water is so much clearer," said Rob Klink, executive chef at D.C.'s Oceanaire, which recycles up to 4,000 shells a week. Klink said the program is easy for restaurants to handle along with typical operations and it is for a "worthwhile program." "Anything to clean up the bay is the way to go. It is going to help the rockfish.

It is going to help the crabs. It is going to help everything," he said. Claude Ibrahim, general manager of Hank's Oyster Bar in Alexandria, said the restaurant's employees are happy to recycle about 3,000 oysters a week, and the staff will take a field trip in the spring to the hatchery to learn the entire process. "The ORP logo is on the menu, so people are aware that our oyster shells are getting recycled," Ibrahim said. By CHRISTY GOODMAN The Washington Post Restaurants are helping to restore the Chesapeake Bay's health, one oyster shell at a time.

The Oyster Recovery Partnership began the Shell Recycling Alliance in March with the help of the Baltimore shucking community. Since then, about 50 restaurants, caterers and seafood wholesalers from the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia have been steadily contributing to the program. The partnership and its affiliate organizations seed the recycled shells with baby oysters, or spat, and then plant them on managed oyster bars throughout the bay and its tributaries. "In 2010, ORP and its partners processed, cleaned and transported more than 60,000 bushels of shell that was in turn used to produce and plant more than 450 million baby oysters onto 316 acres back into the bay," Stephan Abel, executive director of the partnership, said in a statement. Experts say disease, overharvesting and loss of habitat have contributed to the oyster population in the bay declining to 1 percent of its historic high levels recorded in the 1880s.

The oyster shells provide a natural, hard bottom that is necessary for spat to grow and thrive. About 10 spat can fit on an average half shell. Once the oyster has grown to a mature size, or about three inches, that oyster can filter about 50 gallons of water a day, improving the water quality and health of the bay. working to restore the bay's oyster populations. President Barack Obama included restoration of 20 bay tributaries with native oyster habitats by 2025 in his executive order to restore the Chesapeake Bay's watershed.

Shuckers and chefs at the restaurants dump shells into buckets which get rinsed and held until the Oyster Recovery Partnership or a participating company pick them up. The shells are taken to the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge, where they are cleaned, dried and aged in the sun, said Bryan Gomes, who works with the Oyster Recovery Partnership. When that nearly yearlong process is finished, the oyster shells are seeded "It just made sense. It wasn't something they had to sell us on," said Christian Guidi, general manager of D.C.'s Old Ebbitt Grill, which recycles about 14,000 oysters a week. Old Ebbitt Grill primarily serves boutique oysters from the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast regions of the United States.

"The oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay has gotten to the point where it is really not sustainable for our needs," Guidi said. "There aren't as many options available to us at this point; hence the program. Maybe 10 years from now it will be different." The Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration are among the many partners that have been Getty Images Area restaurants might import oysters from far afield, but the shells end up in a Chesapeake oyster bed, helping to clean up the bay. with the larvae in pools to grow before they are planted on reefs, he said. "It is amazing the difference when the oysters are Todd: Ardent advocate knows how to build consensus NOMINATIONS You can help influence those chosen for 50 Who Matter by sending a nomination letter to 50whomatterdelawareonline.com, explaining in an essay of 500 words or fewer your affiliation to the person being nominated and the kind of work he or she is doing to make our region a better place.

CJ- IT ri PATRICIA TODD Who: Environmental advocate with a special interest in recycling and energy conservation. Todd is a past president of the New Castle County League of Women Voters and follows environmental issues for the organization. Age: 76 Residence: Wilmington Occupation: Retired. Formerly was an accountant. Before that, taught high school chemistry.

LT V.J7 I 1 fVXA Delaware. The recently adopted recycling measure took even longer than the bottle bill to pass: 10 years, Todd said. Fleming's husband, Dick, who also serves with Todd on the recycling committee, said he believes the reason it takes so long to get things done is because people are afraid of change and prefer the status quo. "As you look back, sometimes individuals can really make a difference," he said, noting that Todd's tenacity in sticking with is-sues has been a key. "That's what it takes, oftentimes, to get something done in Delaware." Todd doesn't browbeat people over to her side.

Marjorie A. Crofts, director of the state Division of Waste and Hazardous Substances, said that while Todd is passionate about what she believes in, "she's also reasonable. She's very approachable. Pat is one of those gems." Delaware Solid Waste Authority Chief Executive Officer Pasquale S. Can-zano agreed.

"She's very ardent about what she does," he said. "But she's somewhat of a consensus builder." Todd said her goal is to see Delawareans recycle more and send less to landfills. Meanwhile, she is also interested in energy policy. With residential recycling, she said, the key is curb-side service. "Then we must convince the commercial people they need to do more recycling," she said.

"We have much further to go." Contact Molly Murray at 463-3334 or mmurraydelawareonline.com. FROM PAGE Al littered with steel cans and whole and broken bottles. Shards of glass ended up in pastures where animals were grazing and in planted fields. Todd and others, including the late Rep. Gwynne P.

Smith, thought there had to be a better way. Their idea was to get people to recycle beverage containers and encourage it by charging a refundable deposit. For more than three decades, that has been Todd's volunteer mission: finding a better way to handle Delaware's trash. For her efforts to move the state toward recycling, The News Journal is honoring her as one of its 50 Who Matter, a list of Delaware's unsung heroes people who make a difference in all of our lives. "She really has her finger on everything environmental," said longtime friend and fellow environmental advocate Lorraine Fleming.

She tells the Pat Todd story like this: The two women met in the Niagara Falls area of New York decades ago. Fleming's husband, Richard, and Todd's late husband, Bill, were lab partners at a DuPont Co. facility there. Fleming was involved in water resources issues when she met Todd. "I talked her into joining the League of Women Voters," she said.

Then, with Todd in the ranks, Fleming said she moved on to other interests. But she left the league in good hands. Todd stayed active in the civic organization for Watch video and follow the series at delaware- -ft. passage of the bottle bill and then went back to college to earn an accounting degree. She worked for several years and then returned to recycling issues, again through her involvement with the league.

That first bottle bill took years to pass even with the support of 57 civic and com-munity organizations throughout the state, Todd said. Smith, who died late last year, kept reintroducing the bill session after session until it finally passed, Todd said. "We started in 1976 and it passed in 1982. She would keep introducing it every two years." In the end, the bottle bill advocates weren't completely satisfied, she said. They had hoped the bill would go further and cover more types of containers, but the goal of cleaning up litter was partially met, she said.

1999 initiative "It's amazing that we ever got it passed," she said. "We were trying to cut down litter and get recycling started in Delaware." Todd continued with the league and got more involved in 1999, when Gov. Tom Carper formed a committee with a goal of increasing recycling in The News JournalROBERT CRAIG Pat Todd is monitoring Delaware's conversion to curbside recycling with an eye to the future she says the next step is to encourage more recycling by businesses. online.com50whomatter. her, I learn something new.

She's been at it for a really long time. She's an amazing woman." Todd is a background player, meaning few people in the state may realize how influential she has been. But Vinton likened her accomplishments to those of many elected officials when it comes to influencing state policy. Todd was a high school chemistry teacher in New York, but when she got to Delaware, chemistry teachers weren't in demand. She volunteered with the League of Women Voters, became involved with the decades in New York and then in Delaware and over the years became a champion for many of the First State's key environmental issues among them recycling and energy policy.

Behind the scenes, she met, nudged and convinced state lawmakers first to pass the controversial bottle bill and then, more recently, to adopt recycling legislation. Her gift, said B.J. Vinton who chairs the Delaware Recycling Advisory Council on which Todd serves, is a deep understanding of how government and politics work. "She has always been the most experienced person on the council," Vinton said. "She has worked very hard at this.

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