For each port, whether small or big, dredging campaigns are a necessary cost to be paid for enable commercial, fishing and marina’s activities. Beyond the economic cost, the environmental impacts can be of great importance for the surroundings of the port.

Small ports face two difficulties that bigger ports can address more easily, meaning optimizing the cost of dredging and limiting its effects on the port ‘surroundings environment.

Local ports in Europe are subject to different marine conditions depending on their geographical situation and to European and national legislations that impact the way they address the issue of dredging.

Through SuPorts, the small ports involved have exchanged their good practices and also met bigger ports through different events of different European projects and a core workshop in Piombino in October 2012.

The work carried out has led to focus on several sub-issues applied to sustainable dredging:

-      How to better manage dredged material

-      How to reduce the cost of dredging campaigns

-       Understanding and comparing national legislation

The best practices identified have shown many ways to deal with Sustainable dredging. These have shown for instance in the case of the Seine-Maritime County Council ports that national legislation could enable port authorities to organize together joint public procurement procedure to reduce the cost of dredging campaigns. Provided by the University of Thessaloniki, best practices have shown innovative ideas for land reclamation and rehabilitation of a polluted seabed in the port of Thessaloniki as well as the successful beneficial use of dredged material in the port of Piraeus, minimising in parallel the release of pollutants by using devices such as an environmental grab dredger and silt curtains.

Portos de Galicia has described its reflections undertaken to review its dredged material disposal sites organization to avoid both dispersed pollution and reduce bureaucratic burden when having too many disposal sites and authorizations to obtain.

The Port authority of Piombino through the writing of a publication, some other Italian ports’ good practices examples provided by ISPRA or by the Klaipeda State Seaport Authority have enabled the partnership to get a thorough overview of the methodologies, techniques and ideas that ports can have in order to face the issue of sustainable dredging.

Finally, the Seine-Maritime County Council has produced a study financed through the SuPorts project to understand the conditions of sedimentation in its port and identify solutions to limit it. A methodological guide describing the study’s methodology has been shared with the SuPorts partners.

A dedicated handbook included in the SuPorts final Scrapbook compiles all these practices and results and will be available to all ports interested in the topic.