CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Port of Cleveland was facing a serious problem. The dikes on the lakefront that contained contaminated sediment from the shipping channel on the Cuyahoga River had reached near-capacity. The Ohio EPA had determined it was not safe to deposit the sediment out in the lake. And the financially stressed port did not have $150 million to build a new dike.

Outdated sediment-disposal practices threatened to shut down the port, a $3.5 billion economic engine for the region.

Today, seven years later, cone-shaped piles of clean sand taller than a one-story building, sit alongside the Cuyahoga River in Independence, about five miles upriver of the shipping channel. A machine in the water, called a bed load interceptor, captures the sediment and pulls out the sand that feeds those piles.

With less sediment downriver, port staff said that the life of the existing containment dike facility can be extended by 30 years.

The interceptor is the latest innovation in the collection of sediment. And Cleveland is the first port in the country to install one.

An innovative approach

The interceptor is part of a wave of green technology the port has employed since its CEO Will Friedman joined the agency in 2010. This machine was introduced by Jim White, director of Sustainable Infrastructure Programs, one of Friedman's first hires. That decision may have been Friedman's smartest move.

White appeared to be an unconventional choice, an environmentalist and former head of the Cuyahoga River Remedial Action Plan, a group dedicated to the restoration of the once-polluted river. He previously served as the government manager of Culpepper County, Va., and he still has a detectable Virginia drawl in his voice. He's a devoted fan of the Cleveland Orchestra and keeps his truck's satellite radio tuned to a classical station.

White told Friedman that a few years earlier, he'd met an engineer who had invented a machine that addressed the build-up of sediment in streams and rivers. It was an idea born out of necessity.

That engineer Randy Tucker, the CEO of Streamside Technology in Findlay, had just finished building a cabin on a pristine trout stream in Northern Michigan when a dam broke upstream, filling the crystal clear water with dirty sediment, recalled his son-in-law, Brian Halm, the operations manager at Streamside Technology.

"He thought outside the box and figured out a way to remove the sediment from the stream," Halm said, describing the genesis of the bed load interceptor, a 4-foot-wide, wing-shaped machine that is designed to collect sand and sediment from the river bottom.

"He eventually developed prototypes and perfected it, and that's how the sediment collector came to be," said Halm.

White told Friedman he thought a larger version of the interceptor would work in the Cuyahoga River, collecting tons of clean sand flowing out of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and keeping it from entering the shipping channel.

Friedman was convinced and approved a two-year pilot project to determine if the interceptor was delivered results, White said.

Forging ahead

First, White and a team of students from the University of Akron conducted a series of experiments, placing small interceptors at five separate locations on the river over the course of several months. They sent soil samples collected from each interceptor to the Ohio EPA. They tested clean, White said.

In 2015, White obtained a $1.2 million grant from Ohio's Healthy Lake Erie Fund to buy and install a 30-foot wide interceptor and an on-land dewatering system to recycle the cleaned sediment.

The port's interceptor works like this: It collects sand from the bottom of the river, depositing it into a hopper. From there, it is pumped ashore. Fish and gravel are kept out by a series of closely spaced rods and flow over the top of the interceptor downriver. A screw conveyor carries the sand up an incline. The clean, dewatered sand tumbles onto piles below, and the water is recycled back into the river. (For details, see graphic)

When operating at full capacity, which happens when the river is flowing at its usual 4 miles per hour, the interceptor could decrease the need for dredging by 10 to 15 percent, White said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for seeing that the channel is dredged And while it costs the federal agency $17 per cubic yard to dredge sediment from the shipping channel, it only costs about $1 per cubic yard to collect sediment in the interceptor, White said.

This year, the Army Corps is paying a contractor $3.7 million to dredge 200,000 cubic yards of sediment from the channel, the equivalent of 16,000 truckloads of soil.

Removing the sand before it reaches the shipping channel, thus reducing the amount of sediment that needs to be dredged, is only one of the interceptor's benefits: The captured sand can be treated as an asset with financial value, not a waste product to be piled forever in lakefront storage dikes.

To realize the project's potential, the port needed a partner.

Friedman and White negotiated a deal with Kurtz Bros. Inc., a private landscaping company located on the river in Independence to operate the interceptor behind the company's facility.

"The port's not in the soil marketing business," White said. "We needed a company like Kurtz Bros. to fill that role in a public-private partnership."

The agreement calls for Kurtz to use some of the filtered sand for its own projects, and to sell the rest to companies for composting, construction, landscaping and road fill. In return, Kurtz pays 5 percent of its profits to the port to compensate for its operational costs.

"The quality of the material is beyond all expectations," said Jason Ziss of Kurtz.

Kurtz has been so pleased with the interceptor's potential that it recently bought a second machine for possible future placement in a different river or at a different location on the Cuyahoga. The company is marketing itself as the go-to company for sediment solutions.

Dealing with contaminated sediment

The interceptor can't stop all the sediment build-up in the channel. The Army Corps of Engineers still is responsible for the removal of sediment from the shipping channel and its removal to containment dikes near Burke Lakefront Airport.

In a more costly and complicated process than that done by the interceptor, Kurtz mines the sand at the port's sediment containment dike.

Using a three-stage cleansing and dewatering system Kurtz excavates the dredged sand that has been loaded into the dike over the past 20 years, removes the water and contaminants, and trucks the clean sand off the dike for sale or use at its own projects.

Kurtz mixes contaminated sediments with clean soil, clay or sand elsewhere on the dike and then is able to sell it as usable material, Ziss said. The water is returned to the lake after it has been tested and found clean.

Kurtz has used tons of collected sand from both operations at sites such as the Innerbelt Bridge project, and for construction of Stage 3 of the Towpath Trail project, which starts in Tremont. Possible future uses include applying a 2-foot cap of clean material atop contaminated soil at the Clark Field land restoration in Tremont, and residential use, such as filling the basements of homes demolished by the Cuyahoga Land Bank.

Prior to the installation of the interceptor and the mining at the dike, if Kurtz needed clean sand it had to buy it from mines in Portage County, Ziss said.

With the recent heavy spring rainfall turning the Cuyahoga River into a deep, brown torrent, the interceptor has been running almost continuously, providing the company with all the sand it needs, Ziss said.

The interceptor operates at the mercy of the weather. The first two years of the pilot project were uncharacteristically dry, so the interceptor underperformed, he said.

So far this year, however, the machine is working up to expectations, and Ziss said Kurtz is optimistic.

"We've really been able to balance our business," Ziss said. "Before we joined these projects, if it was raining we couldn't get anything done. Now we're collecting tons of sand."

A model of success

The Port of Cleveland's early success with the bed load interceptor, and the machine's potential for use at other ports, is being recognized across the country.

"It's a real positive message that people are trying to be creative in their approach to dredging," said Jim Sharrow, director of Port Planning and Resiliency for the Port of Duluth, Minnesota.

Sharrow has visited the interceptor site and said he is studying the feasibility of a similar interceptor at his port. He conceded it would be a "tougher task" to accomplish there, however, without a private industry partner like Kurtz Bros. located on the banks of the St. Louis River.

Smaller versions of the bed load interceptor are in place on creeks, streams and rivers throughout North America, and potential projects are being studied for sites in the Mississippi River delta and coastal areas, according to Streamside's Halm.

During the two years the interceptor has been in use in Cleveland, the port has been working with the Ohio EPA to continue to test the soil removed from the river. To date, all of the results have been clean, White said.

The EPA's Heidi Griesmer said the first bed load interceptor in the Great Lakes appears to have been a good investment.

"It certainly has the potential to reduce the need for dredging in the future," Griesmer said.

The ArcelorMittal steel mill, which is the port's biggest shipping customer, receiving 4 million tons of iron ore and limestone per year, is exploring the possibility of purchasing its own interceptor, White said. They would install the soil-collector upriver from the company's docks at the six-mile marker, where up to 20,000 cubic feet of sediment accumulates per year.

The Corps of Engineers' Andrew Kornacki said the agency is pleased with the port's innovative approach to sediment management. The less sediment that flows down river, the less the Corps has to remove, he said.

The next step in the pilot project is to strategically place boulders in the river as a means of funneling the water and sediment toward the interceptor.

"When the river is flowing to its specifications the machine is performing as we had thought it would," Friedman said. "Now we need to figure out how to make it work better."