New York City restaurants are giving discarded oyster shells a second life by keeping hundreds of pounds of them out of landfills every day and sending them to a project rebuilding oyster reefs across New York Harbor. The Billion Oyster Project collects more than 300,000 pounds of shells from participating restaurants each year, equivalent to roughly 800 pounds a day. Instead of becoming waste, the shells are cleaned, cured and eventually used as a foundation for new oyster reefs. The effort is part of a much larger restoration programme that has already helped return more than 200 million oysters to New York Harbor and restore about 19 acres of reef habitat. The unusual recycling effort is turning a common restaurant waste product into material for rebuilding a lost marine ecosystem.
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