shells

In 1928, California garbage collector Art Beal began a hillside shack; over 50 years, discarded cans, car parts, and shells became Nitt Witt Ridge

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Art Beal built Nitt Witt Ridge with materials others discarded, shaping a steep California hillside into nine levels of terraces and structures. He lived there until 1989. (Wikimedia Commons)

Most people see the city dump as the place where broken things go to die. Art Beal saw a source of building materials. In 1928, he bought two and a half acres of pine-covered hillside in Cambria Pines, California, and began building a home from salvaged objects. According to the SPACES Archives profile of the … Read more

Meet Nathan Gael Montelongo, the La Joya, Texas seventh-grader who turned restaurant shellfish shells into chitosan, improved polluted Rio Grande water and designed a self-dosing cleanup raft

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Meet Nathan Gael Montelongo, the La Joya, Texas seventh-grader who turned restaurant shellfish shells into chitosan, improved polluted Rio Grande water and designed a self-dosing cleanup raft

Nathan Gael Montelongo, the La Joya, Texas seventh-grader who turned restaurant shellfish shells into chitosan (Image Credit: Society for Science) A fishing trip along the Rio Grande led a La Joya, Texas, seventh-grader to investigate whether discarded shellfish shells could help remove pollution from water. Nathan Gael Montelongo became interested in the problem after a … Read more

Taiwanese students are turning discarded oyster shells and coral waste into 3D-printed structures for damaged reefs

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Taiwanese students are turning discarded oyster shells and coral waste into 3D-printed structures for damaged reefs

A group of students in Taiwan has found a way to give discarded shellfish waste a second life beneath the waves. Their project, named Reefvive, takes oyster shells and coral gravel that would otherwise be thrown away and turns them into 3D-printed bases for growing coral. According to the James Dyson Award, the structures have … Read more

A Japanese village was drowning in 40,000 tonnes of scallop shells; then they crushed them to make stronger safety helmets for the fishermen

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A Japanese village was drowning in 40,000 tonnes of scallop shells; then they crushed them to make stronger safety helmets for the fishermen

Sarufutsu, a village on the northernmost tip of Japan’s Hokkaido, is known for scallops. The village contributes to about 15% of the country’s entire scallop catch, and Japan eats tens of thousands of tons of the sweet, sashimi-grade shellfish. However, what people consume is the muscle, not the shell.The shells are nothing more than waste … Read more

Britain is dropping 20 concrete reef cubes and 44 tons of scallop shells into the sea in the hope to bring back its native oysters who have reduced by 95% since 1800s

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Britain is dropping 20 concrete reef cubes and 44 tons of scallop shells into the sea in the hope to bring back its native oysters who have reduced by 95% since 1800s

While one might assume that lowering huge white blocks of concrete into the sea was an attempt at dumping construction waste offshore, in Britain’s North Sea it is a conservation effort. The country is dumping 20 carefully designed structures into the deep waters to restore the population of the European native oyster, Ostrea edulis, along … Read more