Developing a high resolution site characterization method for contaminated marine sediments

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SCG Industries provides environmental site assessments and remediation services for land-based contaminated**sites. The company has developed site assessment tools for these sites that allow remediation to proceed in an**efficient and cost-effective manner. Marine-based contaminated sites, under water, represent different**challenges to site assessment. Dredging and disposal of contaminated sediments in estuaries and harbours**represent a significant cost. To ensure proper cleanup, dredging of large areas is performed based on site**assessments (i.e. expensive water-based drilling) which also unfortunately results in a small number of**samples. Dredging plans are then conservatively developed to encompass this uncertain dataset and increased**dredge volumes (i.e. higher disposal costs) are generated due to necessary uncertainty. Currently, there is no**prevalent site characterization technique used for this problem.**SCG has identified the potential for a new characterization technique for marine environments. With this**capability, SCG will be more competitive in the marketplace, both locally and internationally and will open**new markets among customers wanting to reduce dredging costs. SCG will collaborate with Dalhousie**University and the research team's knowledge of marine contaminated sediment to develop a new High**Resolution Site Characterization (HRSC) technique for this application. Given this work represents the**development of a novel method, one field site will serve to develop the method and provide proof of concept**for this method. The project will involve laboratory and field work to support the development of the novel**data filtering method for detecting real-time contamination of marine sediments. The underlying challenge to**development of this technique is ensure that an appropriate data filtering technique can be developed by the**researchers and SCG to ensure adequate detection capability of the characterization technique. Several HRSC**tools will be used to explore different levels of sensitivity obtained from the various data filtering techniques.