Life Cycle Assessment of Dredged Materials Placement Strategies: Case Study, Damietta Port, Egypt

Over time, Egypt has used to dispose of dredging and deepening materials for ports and marines wet areas by one technique via transported it to a damped area where water depth is nearly 20 m. Regardless the generated and acquisition greatest ecological environmentally impacts for this process, despite international calls to reduce the harmful emissions to the environment. The present paper uses life cycle assessment (LCA) tool to evaluate the extent of the negative impacts associated with processes of dredging and sedimentation displacement in Damietta port which suffers from annual high rates of sedimentation transportation. Also, to encourage the Egyptian government to change their placement strategy by suggesting another benefit and little ecological impact compared with open water placement technique via upland placement which government is thinking through but not applied yet. The results show that: the associated impacts for upland placement has little impacts reach to 20% compared to transportation to a damped area in the Mediterranean Sea for different impact categories, where the transportation process was the main contributes to ecological impacts in addition to consumption of huge fuel for this process. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first time to address this topic for Egyptian ports.