Filling New York Harbor with Millions Of Oysters to Fight Pollution
Nearly every weekday trucks pick up 4 tons of oyster shells from 70 restaurants across the city for the Billion Oyster Project. Peter Malinowski and a team of students and employees use them—an estimated one-tenth of the total amassed in the city each week—to build reefs and nurture oyster populations in New York Harbor.
Oysters filter out excess nitrogen—the harbor's primary pollutant—produced by the city's treated wastewater. And their beds could protect shorelines from storms like Sandy. The project has introduced 22 million of the mollusks into the harbor since it began in 2014, which means Malinowski has only 978 million to go.
"The project's biggest impact is to convince New Yorkers to care about the natural resource that surrounds us: water," he said. . .