Dredged material for beach nourishment along the Northern Adriatic shoreline

Historically, dredged material has been beneficially used for over 2,500 years on the coasts of Europe and Asia, and the Phoenicians and Romans hand-dredged to deepen and maintain their ports and harbors in the Mediterranean Sea. In more modern times, the Dutch, French, Italians, British, Australians, Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Greeks, citizens of Hong Kong, and other nations use their dredged sediments beneficially in different ways. For example, the Dutch and British use dredged material for fast land creation to expand their land base, and are beginning to apply dredged material to habitat restoration, as well. The Italians are involved in complex projects such as dredging coupled with providing flood gates for the City of Venice. Nowadays, alternative use of dredged material from marine ports and navigation channels is an under explored opportunity for beach nourishment along several eroding beaches in the Northern Adriatic shoreline. Legislative and regulative constraints at national and local levels addressed this environmental issue toward exploitation of open-sea sand pits to replenish beach erosion occurring at regional scale. As a result, only selected sites in the open sea are elected as suitable to dredge sand material, and subjected to a regular monitoring of environmental conditions. On the other hand, some millions cubic meters of sediments regularly dredged from the ports located along the Northern Adriatic Sea shoreline, are presently disposed in the final placement site or a rehandling facility, namely, Confined Disposal Facilities (CDFs). In this paper, we present a review of chemical data of sediments dredged in regional areas, and compare their characteristics with shore sediments, in order to valuate their suitability for beneficial reuses in coastal areas. This work also considers dredged sediment quality towards Sediment Quality Guidelines (SQGs) set by the USEPA. Such guidelines are based on chemical data and toxicity responses, and could be of use for the assessment contaminant levels in dredged material before and after final placement in nearshore environments, in the absence of regional specific criteria in permitting process for beneficial reuse projects