Last week, IRIS affiliate Todd Bridges attended the annual conference of the Western Dredging Association, where he gave a presentation titled “The Plant and People Need a Better Way: New Frontiers for Beneficial Use” — in this instance Beneficial Use refers to the practice of using the sediment moved for projects for another, beneficial project, such as wetland restoration or creation.

Bridges’ main takeaways:

1. The planet and people need a better way of building and operating infrastructure systems and the construction community will be an important part of making progress.
2. The twin tribulations of the planetary crisis are climate change and biodiversity loss. These threats to life on the planet are byproducts of our own engineering.
3. Landscape transformation, brought about by large scale engineering (taking many forms), is a root cause of the crisis.
4. The history of wetlands in the U.S., and all the ecosystem services they support, is a powerful example of landscape transformation. At the close of the 18th century, there were an estimated 220 million acres of wetlands in the conterminous U.S. Today there are 110 million acres. 
5. While there are many contributors to landscape transformation, we should acknowledge that dredging has been a powerful tool of transformative change in rivers, estuaries, and coasts. In the U.S., we annually dredge about 250 million cubic yards of sediment, the actual building material of wetlands and other Nature-based Solutions (NbS).
6. Applying the concept of sustainability, the goal of 21st century engineering should be to build regenerative, nature-positive infrastructure and systems.
7. Applying the principles of the circular economy to sediment management is straightforward.
8. The Corps of Engineers made a major commitment in 2023 by establishing a national goal of 70% BU (beneficial use) by 2030 (70×30), which amounts to roughly 175 million cubic yards of sediment annually.
9. There is leadership support in and beyond the Corps for pursuing the benefits of BU and NbS.
10. Sustainability is fundamental to being a 21st century engineer.
11. There are many paths and means to achieving BU.
12. There is something for everyone to do in innovating for a nature-positive future!