Billion Oyster Project — Restoring Native Oyster Reefs in New York Harbor

Billion Oyster Project was founded in 2008 by the New York Harbor School, a New York City public high school, with the goal of restoring one billion native oysters to New York Harbor by 2035 while engaging one million people in the effort, after oysters had become functionally extinct in the harbor following over a century of dredging, pollution and overharvesting.

The project's mechanism combines shell recycling and reef engineering with education: used oyster shells are collected from more than 75 partner NYC restaurants, cured, and used as cultch for hatchery-raised oyster larvae, then deployed as reef structures at 8-plus monitored sites across the harbor, with more than 11,000 public school students and over 16,000 volunteers taking part in restoration and monitoring work.

The organisation's own site cites over 150-200 million oysters restored across roughly 17-19 acres of reef and around 2-3 million pounds of shell recycled as of late 2025, a 2015 National Science Foundation grant of $5 million funded expansion of the schools programme, and the project is a named partner in New York State's $107 million Living Breakwaters coastal-resilience project in Staten Island.

Long-term monitoring has confirmed oysters can survive and reproduce in the harbor, but the specific oyster-count and acreage figures come from the organisation's own reporting, and no independently published, peer-reviewed population survey or water-quality-improvement measurement at these reef sites was found, so ecosystem-service claims like filtration should be read as biologically plausible rather than locally measured.