Dredging is the excavation of waterbeds to remove sediment, pollutants, and other materials. It has four purposes: creating or deepening waterways, catching seafood, removing pollutants and invasive species, and extracting desired materials. Dredging poses environmental problems, but laws and alternative methods are being developed to minimize consequences.
Dredging is a process that involves the aquatic excavation of waterbeds to remove sediment, pollutants, crustaceans and other materials. The methods and machinery used in dredging vary widely. Most dredging is done by vessels towing a dredge along the waterbed. Self-driving dredgers and dredge pumping stations are used for routine tasks. A dredger, which is the common term for the different types of machinery that perform dredging, can cut away sediment, collect the materials like a back hoe, or suck it up through a large pipe to be deposited into a ship, barge, or other containment system.
Dredging has four general purposes:
1) Dredging is preformed to create or deepen waterways to allow the passage of large vessels. Over time, streams fill with silt and sediment that require fairly general maintenance to be efficient. With ever-expanding markets, there is also a demand for new waterways to be created.
2) Dredging is used to catch seafood. This type of dredging involves dragging a wire mesh along the bottom of the ocean floor or other large body of water to catch animals such as crabs, fish and squid.
3) Dredging is done in an attempt to remove pollutants and invasive plant species from a particular body of water, although this practice is controversial. Removing pollutants in this way often causes other environmental problems such as habitat destruction of important plant and animal species.
4) Dredging can be used to remove desired materials from the waterbed, such as minerals. It can also be used for land restoration by dumping dredged sediment onto land that has been lost to the sea as is the case on the gulf coast in the United States. Similarly, some beaches are maintained this way by collecting sand offshore and redistributing it along the beach.
Dredging poses many environmental problems. There is the issue of where the dredged material will be disposed of. Often the material is dumped into estuaries, which are shallow inlets of a sea or river mouth. Discharge into estuaries can lead to flooding and the destruction of rich habitats. In the United States, laws have been developed under the Clean Water Act to keep dredging activities under control and minimize environmental consequences. As the environmental effects become more apparent, the dredging industry is working to improve dredging machinery and processes using alternative methods whenever possible.
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