The New York/New Jersey Harbor has a natural depth of 19 feet, while ships now using the Harbor require a depth of 40 to 45 feet. Due to the shallow natural depth, continual silting of the navigational channels occurs, and they must be periodically dredged to maintain safe passage for vessels. This maintenance dredging generates between 6 to 7 million cubic yards of sediment annually. Historically, the dredged material has been disposed by dumping in the ocean. However, changes to federal regulations have set new, lower standards for contaminant levels suitable for ocean disposal. Under the new rules, approximately 4 to 6 million cubic yards annually will require some form of processing or decontamination prior to disposal of the material.
The need to dispose of dredge materials has created an economic issue for the New York/New Jersey Port industry, which supports more than 200,000 jobs and contributes $20 billion each year to the regional economy. The feared impact of not finding a solution is that the shipping business currently coming into the NY/NJ Port will dwindle as new, deeper- draft ships are unable to safely navigate, and are thus forced to use deeper draft ports elsewhere.
U.S. EPA Region 2 and Army Corps of Engineers, NY District, are jointly directing a project funded by the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) to demonstrate decontamination technologies. Department of Energy - Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is managing demonstrations by seven technology vendors. BioGenesis Enterprises, Inc. is one of these firms. The WRDA project goal is to establish a production-scale facility able to treat 500,000 cubic yards of dredged material annually. In addition to successful removal or treatment of organic contaminants (including polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and organochlorides such as dioxins, furans, and PCBs) and inorganic heavy metals, the WRDA project is addressing the additional issues of materials handling and beneficial reuse of treated or decontaminated material.
BioGenesis performed optimization tests on NY/NJ Harbor sediment on February 28, 1997. The contaminated sediment supplied by BNL contained detectable levels of all contaminants of concern. Following decontamination of the material, BioGenesis sent “before and after” samples to Triangle Laboratory, where testing showed remarkably high removal efficiencies for all contaminants. The results (summarized in the chart) for both organic and inorganic contaminants prove conclusively the effectiveness of the BioGenesis™ Washing Technology as applied to an incredibly complex and difficult sediment matrix.
Full-Scale Demonstration Project
The BioGenesis Sediment Washing Technology has recently completed over 15 years of technology development and demonstration under the US Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) New York/New Jersey Harbor sediment decontamination demonstration program. In collaboration with the US EPA Region 2 and the State of New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) BioGenesis has demonstrated the efficacy of the technology in treating contaminated harbor sediment from the Lower Passaic River utilizing commercial-scale equipment.
On December 17, 2009, BioGenesis published the Final Report on the New York/New Jersey Demonstration Project. Please click through the following PDF in order to review the detailed process, procedure, and analytical results for the Demonstration Project.
New York/New Jersey Demonstration Project Final Report >>
References Cited in the New Jersey Demonstration Project Final Report