I know people can buy jewellery made from them there must be a way to make that jewellery. Clean them up, sterilise them and drill a small hole (with a craft drill) to make a pendent?

The shells polish up nicely.

If you really care about the environment you shouldn’t be eating these to begin with.

she wasn’t, it was another diner.

Sorry Ben, but having grown up on the ocean I can tell you that were it not for the harvesting of such shellfish they would be so prolific as to take over whole ecosystems. Our fault for overfishing different species so now we have to manage our own screwups.

Ben, that was a completely nonconstructive comment.

Of course we can all be greener. The fact that you own a computer and use the electricity required to run it means YOU could be doing more for the environment.

When will we stop this ridiculous one-upmanship and start applauding each other for what we ARE doing?

Way to go lusi, for trying to figure out a way to recycle something that most people would dismiss.

I would suggest washing them thoroughly, grinding them up, and putting them around plants that tend to get eaten by slugs or snails. Egg shells work well for this, so I don’t see why other shells wouldn’t work too.

Could they be recycled in the garden if they were crushed first?

They do use crushed shells in place of gravel for driveways and walk ways.

When we lived in Florida, seafood restaurants would crush the shells and use them to “pave” the parking lot–kind of like crushed stone.

In North Carolina oyster shells are banned from landfills. They want people to recycle them so they can be put back in the ocean for baby oysters to grow on. I am not a biologist so I am sure some of the details are wrong but that is the jist. I am not sure if mussels work the same way.

Shells are basically made of calcium. In the construction industry, calcium/lime is a very useful material - used in cement, mortar etc… In parts of India, Goa especially, shells were powered and used to make mortar and plaster - though this was in the years gone by…. now people mostly use cement. While a mortar and plaster industry cannot be based on left-over shells from restaurants, they could contribute to it if one existed. For those interested in using it for their own homes, I guess they could go around gathering up shells from different places….

Oh… I remembered another use… a friend’s uncle once picked some up from the beach, washed them and popped them into his sugar, tea and coffee jars. They looked much better than plastic spoons.
:-)

they can be broken up and used to improve nutrition for pet chickens, (and probably other birds…)

if they can be crushed down to 1/2″ to 1″ pieces they make okay ground cover for flower gardens and/or around bases of trees. it will keep weeds down, moisture in, and will break down into simple calcium over time.

a friend made spoons out of muscle shells, he attached a stick to it.

The fancy compost one can buy at the Union Square Green Market in NYC brags of oyster shells as an ingredient. Perhaps it would be possible to give seafish shells to growing trade in organic compost…
Give them to some rather large family farm that sells organic compost. I know that there are family run organic farms in New York that are making more money from selling great compost than they are from their vegetables or livestock. Perhaps a farm like that would welcome mussel shells…

Otherwise I’d crush them in a bag with a hammer and mix them into my compost.

Yeah, they’d be great in compost, but they’d make it very alkaline so be careful only to use it for plants that can tolerate that.

They could be useful in an aquarium - lots of places have quite acidic water that lots of aquarium fish can’t handle, so people add shells to the water to neutralise the acid. They eventually dissolve and have to be replaced, and they’d have to be cleaned up really well to avoid spreading disease to fish which are not exposed to natural levels of bacteria etc - boiling them should do it, followed by a scrub in salt water.

I always use shells in my garden. Clean off first, then through them in the beds. They look nice, decompose over time, and provide nutrients to the soil.

benh you would shut up this isnt the only comment like this you’ve made. if you have a fish tank with fish such as south african cichlids they make a great pH buffer (they make the ph alkaline)

Shells can be crushed “automatically” as well: At a “traditional” meal offered by members of a Native American tribe on an island in Puget Sound in the northwest part of Washington state, USA, visitors are instructed, after dining, to throw their empty oyster or clam shells (I don’t recall which) on the path to the lodge where the meal is served. Then, in the course of daily life, as they are walked on and driven over, the shells are crushed into “gravel”.
They also make a pleasant crunching noise and sensation underfoot (not barefoot, please!).
I don’t recall any concerns about first washing the shells. Of course, the frequent rains may take care of the washing, and life on an island may mean helpful seagulls pick the shells clean before rats or slugs or whatever are attracted by the scent.

I bake or fire my mussel shells. This makes them easy to crush/break up as the heat makes them brittle. They mainly contain Calcium Carbonate, but not as much per weight as Oyster shells. If you don’t want to use the extra energy of baking them - UV radiation will do the same trick but take a heck of a lot longer.

If you happen to have chickens or know someone who does, they can be ground up and fed as a calcium supplement. Oyster shells are sold commercially for this. It also works with old chicken egg shells.

when i was younger i ate these all the time!! my mom was very crafty, and we bought a plain wooden frame from the craft store. we glued them on in a pattern, and put pictures of us at the beach in them!! also, we bought a plain wreath from the craft store, made it all with shells and tied a bow at the bottom with some blue ribbon. then we put that on the door of our beach house!!!

how can I make tiles from mussel shells?

the shells can also be used as dishwashers.