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Understanding Dredging

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Treating the Highly Contaminated Sediments From the Industrial Canal Ghent-Terneuzen: Towards a Cleaner Environment With Maximum Re-Use of Materials

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Presented during:

WODCON XX: "The Art of Dredging" - 2013, Brussels, Belgium

Authors:

Pynaert K, Van Zele S, Pallemans I, Nachtergaele KI , David C


Abstract: Since the beginning of the 1980’s about 100.000 m3 of sediments are dredged every year in the canal Ghent-Terneuzen to maintain the necessary nautical depth. At the start, those sediments were severely contaminated by the industrial activities in the area of the canal. Due to limited technical solutions the only possibility at that time was "wet" and untreated disposal of the sediments into a landfill. Therefore, the sediments were pumped hydraulically on land and stored in a disposal facility for sediments called "Callemansputte".

Since the year 2004 the department of Maritime Access of the Flemish government has, through several different tenders, granted the dredging works on the Flemish part of the canal to the Joint Venture Jan De Nul - Dredging International. The sediments are loaded on elevator barges and transported to nearby sediment treatment centers of the joint venture. On those treatment sites, the sediments are dewatered, either by natural dewatering o r b y mechanical dewatering. Afterwards, a maximum amount of slightly contaminated dewatered sediments is treated by e.g. bioremediation. As such, those sediments become available for re-use as construction material in e.g. sound and environmental banks or road foundation. The highly contaminated sediments which can not be treated properly still need to go to a disposal site, but as a result of the dewatering process, the disposed volume is heavily reduced.

The aim of this paper is to show that Flemish waste regulation opens opportunities for sustainable re-use of treated sediments like the ones originating from the Canal Ghent-Terneuzen. As such, in the past 30 years, we evolved from disposing 100.000m3 of highly contaminated non-dewatered sediments a year to the re-use of approximately 2/3 of the sediments a year and only disposing 1/3 of the dredged sediments in a dewatered way taking only a volume of about 20% in comparison with the 1980’s.

Keywords: dredged material, dewatering, bioremediation, re-use

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