2019 Port Phillip Mussel & Jazz Festival

The 2019 Port Phillip Mussel & Jazz Festival, held at South Melbourne Market, is set to give back to its immediate environment by helping restore the bay’s decimated shellfish reefs. For the second year running, the Port Phillip Mussel & Jazz Festival, hosted by the South Melbourne Market, is teaming up with The Nature Conservancy to support their Shuck Don’t Chuck project. This partnership aims to recycle as many mollusc shells from the festival as possible, so they can be used to help restore the bay’s shellfish reefs and their precious ecosystems which have been destroyed by decades of over-harvesting, water pollution, introduced species and disease. Over the two-day festival, held on March 9 and 10, guests are expected to eat their way through more than 200,000 mussels – from piping hot mussel paella to wok-cooked drunken mussels – prepared by some of Melbourne’s top chefs and restaurants, including South Melbourne Market traders and eateries Aptus, South Melbourne Seafood, Bambu, Claypots Evening Star, Paco y Lola, Köy and Simply Spanish. As part of the Shuck Don’t Chuck campaign, festivalgoers are urged to recycle their shells by putting them in the clearly marked bins provided. The shells will then be taken to a facility on the Bellarine Peninsula where they are cured, combined with limestone rubble and then returned to the bay’s sea floor as a ‘settlement substrate’ for juvenile oysters and mussels to cement onto, and in doing so, rebuild new shellfish reefs. The project not only diverts waste from landfill, it creates a cleaner and healthier bay by rebuilding the reef habitat of hundreds of marine species.