Environmental Science and Design Research Institute

Like a financial analyst who pores over numbers to predict the next big trend, Joseph Ortiz, Professor of Geology at Kent State University, is an expert at crunching earth data.

Open water placement of dredged material in Lake Erie will be banned in the State of Ohio after July 1, 2020. However, eight federal navigation harbors built along Ohio’s Lake Erie coast still need to remove more than 1.5 million cubic yards of sediment.

What to do with this large amount of material removed from the ports in Ohio poses a major challenge. Securing the dredged material in a confined disposal facility (CDF) is costly. An alternative approach is to reuse the dredged material as a construction and landscaping material.