November / December 2015
Vol. IX No. 6
Serving Soil, Mulch, Compost & Wood Pellet Producers www.SoilandMulchProducerNews.com
NEWS
Attention Readers !
Are you looking for Products, Equipment or Services for your business? If so, please check out these leading companies advertised in this issue:
Bagging / Wrapping Systems Amadas Industries – pg 4 PremierTech Chronos – pg 23
Buildings & covers ClearSpan – pg 15 ComposTex – pg 21
Compost Equipment/spreaders Ecolawn Applicator – pg 18 Farmer Automatic – pg 15 HCL Machine Works – pg 18
Mulch Coloring Equipment/ Colorants AgriCoatings – pg 14 BASF / Colorbiotics – pg 7 CMC – pg 9
Shredders, Grinders, Chippers & Screening Systems Bandit Industries – pg 13 CW Mill Equip. Co. – pg 3 Ecoverse – pg 12 Komptech Americas – insert Morbark Inc – pg 2 Peterson – pg 17 Premier Tech Chronos – pg 23 Rawlings – pg 8 Rotochopper Inc – pg 11 West Salem Machinery – pg 10
Trommel Brushes
United Rotary Brush Corp – pg 18
TRUCKS & TRAILERS J&J Truck Bodies – pg 24
Wear Parts
ArmorHog – pg 18
WEIGHING SYSTEMS LoadScan – pg 5
River Dredging and Sediment Interception Reaps Rewards for Cleveland Port
F
By Todd Williams
aced with increasing costs of dredging the Cuyahoga River shipping channel, combined with the expense of opening yet another disposal facility for the dredged sediment, the Port of Cleveland (Ohio) has started a bold initiative to recycle this material. And not only is the Port recycling sediment dredged from the Cuyahoga River, before it enters Lake Erie, but it’s also trapping river sediment about 11 miles upstream. All the material harvested from the river, ranging from course sand to gravel, is then being sold as a usable product. According to Jim White, Director, Sustainable Infrastructure Program, at the Port, each year 200,000 to 250,000 cubic yards of material must be dredged from the mouth of the river to a point 5.9 miles upstream in order to keep the river 23 feet deep. This enables ships carrying 20,000 to 23,000 tons of cargo to safely navigate the crooked river channel. These ships transport 12.5 to 16 million tons of cargo annually; primarily iron ore, limestone, aggregates, cements and salt. Since the shipping channel acts as a natural sediment settling area for material coming from
upstream, the loss of merely one inch of river depth equals the reduction of 110 tons of cargo for each ship delivery. Therefore, dredging the channel is critical to keeping the cargo moving upriver to the industrial plants. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is responsible for dredging the federal navigation channel and disposing of the dredged sediments. Over the years the Port and the USACE developed four Confined Disposal Facilities (CDFs), sometimes referred to as “spoils dumps,” along the Lake Erie shoreline. With these CDFs filling up at a the rate of about 250,000 cubic yards of dredged material per year, the Port recently devised a plan to add about seven million tons of new capacity to the existing CDFs. This is accomplished, explains White, by four methods: aggressively dewatering the contained areas to expel the existing 800,000 cubic yards of water found there; by creating and maintaining positive drainage with a series of channels; switching to a more mechanical unloading of the dredged materials; and by stacking the material vertically. Instead of just pumping the typical three-toone mixture of a water and material slurry into Continued on page 3