New York City Is Building a Wall of Oysters to Fend Off Floods
To Fight Floods, New York City Rebuilds a Wall of Oysters
A row of plastic bins sits in a gravel lot next to Brooklyn’s Domino Park promenade; each holds small pieces of New York City’s more climate-proof future. They’re full of oyster shells, leftovers collected from the plates of patrons at more than 45 New York restaurants. Every week, a truck drops the shells at a Greenpoint processing site. (Any ordinary oyster-eater can drop off shells, too.) Then the discards — 1.8 million pounds of them to date — are cleaned, cured in the sun and “set” with microscopic larvae. Redeployed in bags all around the city’s waters, the recycled shells serve as a home for baby oysters to grow on, ultimately building a reef that can soften the blow of big waves, ease erosion, and help prevent coastal flooding from rising seas.