New Life for Dredged Material
Dredging shipping channels is an unavoidable part of harbor maintenance in the western Lake Erie basin. In Toledo, the Army Corps of Engineers removes about one million cubic yards of sediment from the Maumee River each year, washed downstream by heavy rainstorms and agricultural runoff. But once the sediment is removed from the shipping channel, where does it go?
So far, there have been two options: storage in containment facilities, or open lake dumping. However, containment facilities are expensive, take up valuable space, and don’t look particularly attractive. And open lake dumping could add fertilizer attached to sediment particles to an already fragile lake ecosystem, potentially worsening harmful algal blooms.