'Money lying on the ground': Could NZ do more with its 'magical' pāua shells?

A factory on a quiet street at the bottom of the South Island is selling an estimated one million pāua shells per year to buyers like luxury fashion brands Chanel and Cartier and the Sultan of Oman.

Ocean Shell Ltd in Riverton said rising live shellfish exports and the country's ban on the sale of recreational catch meant the company could not meet insatiable demand for the blue gold.

Owner Nina Shields said international luxury status was attached to the iridescent ovals that many New Zealanders used as garden ornaments or repurposed for ashtrays.

"Around here you just see it lying around. People think it's abundant, whereas outside of New Zealand, people really value it. They think it's magical," she said.

The gap between local indifference and overseas desire was exactly what Shields' father Bruce Shields said he spotted in 1992 when he took over the business from a local diver and began marketing directly to factories overseas, bypassing local brokers altogether.

Before long, the part-time job grew into a big business handling 250 tonnes of shells per year, he said.

"When I started, I knew nothing about pāua shell. I just saw it as a business opportunity and we became known as reliable, honest and trustworthy," he said.

Pāua all over palace walls

As well as pāua from around Aotearoa, Ocean Shell Ltd processes trochus shells from Papua New Guinea and South Sudan, which are used to make buttons, along with mother of pearl shells from pearl farms in Broome and Darwin and abalone varieties from South Africa, Japan, Australia and Chile.

Inside the Riverton warehouse, staff dry, polish and grade the shells before shipping them to factories in South-East Asia for processing.

The shells return to Riverton as veneer sheets and are transformed into souvenirs and products in the company's "arts and crafts room", then sold through the business's giftware and craft retailer Ocean Shell Studios.

The business's wholesale division Luméa sells whole shells, shell pieces and veneer sheets to customers around the globe, who transform them into furniture inlays, jewellery, luxury fashion accessories and packaging.

"We work with a furniture fabrication company that's based in Oman who does all the fit outs for the royal family and they've got a thing for pāua. It is all over the palace walls," she said.

"Some of the mother of pearl powder gets used in whitening face creams and we've also supplied mother of pearl powder to some medical companies that were using it for bone grafts. So there are some pretty random uses."

Supply had been shrinking, Shields said.

The company's pāua exports - still the most sought-after shell - had dropped from about 200 tonnes a year to 100, or roughly one million shells.

"We are struggling really from a supply perspective with the shell. We could sell way more," she said.

Shields said the overall volume of pāua being harvested had been falling because of regulatory and sustainability measures, while the rapid rise in live pāua exports over the past five years had pushed more shells straight onto overseas markets rather than New Zealand processing.

"Historically we're getting the shell because the meat gets shucked from the shell. It goes into a can and then it's sold. Now probably 40 percent is going live to Asia," she said.

Shields said New Zealand's ban on selling recreationally harvested seafood meant Ocean Shell Ltd could not buy shells from recreational divers.

"That's in place for good reason, not wanting to incentivise overfishing but maybe one day in the future we can figure that out," she said.

While there was not necessarily more demand for pāua shells, Shields said the constrained supply meant people were willing to pay about three times more than they were 10 years ago.

"We're getting inquiries weekly from new customers or new people that would like to buy large quantities of shell that we simply can't supply because we've already sold what we have," she said.

"To me it seems crazy that there's literally money lying on the ground and we just can't access it but the law is the law."

The Chatham Islands model - pāua shell pick-ups for community causes

On the Chatham Islands, Shields said there was a special exemption to the ban on selling recreational catch.

Locals were able to collect pāua shells that naturally washed up on beaches, sell them to Ocean Shell Ltd and direct the proceeds to local infrastructure and youth programmes.

When Ocean Shell Ltd tried to run a similar drive in Southland to raise money [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/571074/colac-bay-s-shabby-surfer-faces-hefty-replacement-cost

to upgrade Colac Bay's ageing surfer statue] it could not get the idea across the line, she said.

"Unfortunately, they just had to run hundreds of quiz nights," she said.

If the Chatham Islands exemption was extended nationwide, Shields said Ocean Shell Ltd could purchase an estimated 300,000 shells per year worth $500,000

She said the money could go to community projects across the country and would give the government a record of what recreational divers were harvesting.

"We'd be collecting data that's helpful for making sure the industry is sustainable, as well as supporting community," she said.

"I just think it would be amazing for community groups or non-government organisations to be able to have this funding stream."

It might also prompt New Zealanders to think differently about what they leave lying around, she said.

"If you think about greenstone, you never see greenstone lying around because it's so valuable, but you see pāua shell just scattered in people's gardens," she said.