Schnabel Engineering's “Innovative Dredged Material Reuse” project was selected as an Outstanding Project in the American Council of Engineering Companies/Maryland Engineering Excellence Awards (EEA) competition. The objective of the EEA award is “to recognize engineering and surveying firms for projects which demonstrate the highest degree of achievement, value and ingenuity.”

Schnabel recently completed its innovative dredge material reuse project for the Maryland Port Administration, under its new “Innovative Reuse of Dredged Material” program. Schnabel’s study provides a unique way to beneficially use 500,000 cubic yards of Cox Creek dredged material (DM) per year.

  Schnabel demonstrated that blending of Cox Creek DM and steel slag fines (SSF), another waste material, could produce earth-fill materials to be used for construction of highways, parking lots and other construction fill needs. The soft consistency and organic matter content of DM makes it unusable as fill material without blending it with other earth fill, cement or crushed stone, which is costly and uneconomical. Schnabel searched the Baltimore area for a material with little or no cost that would improve the DM for use as fill material. The search led to SSF from the Sparrows Point Steel Mill complex, which is located across the harbor from Cox Creek. Through this study, it was demonstrated that mixing the DM with SSF provided immobilization of the metal contaminants in the DM. When the DM was mixed with the SSF, the metals were immobilized by the residual lime content of the SSF. Additionally, the study demonstrated that construction fill material could be consistently produced mixing DM with as little as 20 percent SSF.