KIDS CORNER
THE ARBOR SCHOOL’S
DUBAI OYSTER PROJECT FEATURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY ALLY LANDES
It was an absolute treat to visit The Arbor School – an international ecological school here in Dubai with a strong set of ethical values, a deep sense of ecoliteracy, sustainability and environmental justice. The school has an impressive engagement with the outdoor environment in which the students learn the values essential to their well-being and of the world they will inherit. I got to meet with Ben Hren, the Environmental Educational Advisor. Ben is in his second year at the school, having worked in the UK, US, and Qatar, both for environmental charities and in schools as a science teacher and an environmental science teacher. I got to pose him with a few questions regarding their Dubai Oyster Project collaboration. THE INTERVIEW Tell us about The Dubai Oyster Project. How did it come about? The Dubai Oyster Project was originally the idea of one of our board members at the Arbor School, and through his relationships and acquaintances of those he knew in the restaurant industry and marine conservation 22
DIVERS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT | MARCH 2022
world, he convinced the Emirates Marine Environment Group (EMEG) and the Maine restaurant, to form a collaboration with us to found The Dubai Oyster Project. His aspiration is that it’s a project that will involve many schools and other restaurants that produce similar food wastes in the form of oyster shells, but right now it’s 3 organisations starting out. What year are the students in that are involved in the project? Our school goes from 4 year olds and it will go right through to 18 year olds, although right now we go through key stage 3 so we’re adding our first cohort of key stage 4 next year and this particular project involves our Year 8. Specifically Year 8, because their curriculum focuses on the marine environment in Dubai, so this is their project. Once you receive the oyster shells from the Maine restaurant, what happens next? First they are diverted from the waste stream. Their staff members thoroughly wash them and put the shells back into the same styrofoam containers they were shipped in from the different parts of the world, and they
are then brought to our school where we store them. Once we have enough of them for the next stage, we take them to the Jebel Ali Marine Reserve. The Emirates Marine Environment Group provide the gargour (dome-shaped metal fish traps) which they have recovered from the sea bottom or which have been donated from storages because they are no longer in use. Does the metal not get too brittle on the gargours if they’ve been left underwater a long time? That’s part of the strategy. By filling them with the oysters, again because we’re at the early stages of the process, we don’t know how many years it takes for those oysters to be fused together by organisms colonising them. When the rust degrades over time, eventually we’ll be left with a pristine reef. Are the students putting the traps down themselves at the reserve? In October, we did our first installation. We took the entire class over and filled the traps
