The Piombino port Authority, partner of the SuPorts project, held on the 16th of October a workshop on dredging, being one of the themes tackled by the project.
 

Entitled “Dredging in the European Union: Regulations, problems and best practices”, the workshop brought together many stakeholders involved in the process: Port managers from small and big ports of Europe, a European dredging association’s representative, research institutes as well as dredging companies engineers.
Many countries were represented, first through the SuPorts partnership and the dredging experts of the ports of Piombino (IT), Seine-Maritime (FR), Galicia (ES) as well as Klaipeda (LT). But also the dredging expert from the big ports of Antwerp (BE) and Rotterdam (NL) gave an overview of their expertise. Engineers working on several ports of Greece including the port of Corfu, an engineer from the port of Koper in Slovenia, a former port manager of the port of Barcelona and a representative of the Swedish geotechnical institute the also added their contribution to this very useful workshop.

Several sub-themes were discussed during this workshop. First, presentations focused on the regulation that is being applied in Europe regarding dredging and dredged material, starting from the European general framework and going more precisely through the different countries specific regulations. The question of dredged material disposal was heavily discussed with the attendance, each country not having the same level of restrictions. Also, best practices examples showed the ways dredged material could be re-used in a beneficial way instead of dumping it at sea. The question of contaminated sediments has been necessarily developed as well during this workshop.

Before obtaining the written conclusions of this workshop, you can find at this page more details as well as the different speakers’ powerpoint presentations.