One type of collateral damage from the COVID pandemic is that many people's diets changed significantly. For example, there were not a lot of people eating at oyster bars, leaving many oysters unsold. The good news is that the SOAR (Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration) program is using many of these to re-seed the Chesapeake Bay. The downside? Just that it takes really a lot of oysters to make a dent in the pollution: 100,000 oysters remove six pounds of pollution. So is that a lot? Well, according to this 2017 article, a good assumption is that about 23 grams per day of nitrogen are emitted from a single septic system. That's about 18 lbs per year, so you'll need 300,000 oysters to clean up a single septic system. Given that these systems are really common on the Delmarva peninsula, and that many, many other sources of pollution are out there besides septic systems... just ugh.
