Conceptual and Strategic Frameworks for Sediment Management at the River Basin Scale Sue M. White a and Sabine E. Apitz b a Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL, UK b SEA Environmental Decisions Ltd, Little Hadham, Hertfordshire SG11 2AT, UK 1. Sediment management today Historically, sediment has been managed at the local level, in locations where it causes a problem. The main driver has normally been a specific local issue such as the need to maintain navigation, water storage or conveyance capacity, or, less frequently, the need to move contaminated sediment from a particular area or to restore habitat. Alongside this there is a long history of beneficial use of sediment, such as extraction of gravel or sand for the construction industry. Over recent years, increased awareness of the quality, as well as the quantity, aspects of sediment have led to increasingly stringent controls on sediment- related activities, and in particular on disposal of dredged material. As well as the more traditional licensing of, or good practice recommendations for, sediment extraction, sediment management activities are now subject to a range of legislation and guidance, such as the EU Hazardous Waste Directive ([1], see also Chapter 3, this book). Some dredged material in Europe is so heavily contaminated by a mixture of organic and non-organic pollutants (see e.g. [2– 4]) that as soon as the extracted sediment breaks the water surface it is classed as a hazardous waste. This can lead to a difficult and expensive series of disposal strategies, such as dewatering, treatment or disposal to specialist contaminated disposal sites [5]. Even where the sediment is not classified as hazardous, increasing demands on agriculture to reduce diffuse sources of pollution and increased restriction on disposal of materials in the marine environment are also curtailing the traditional disposal routes to land or sea [6, 7]. This is making dredging activity increasingly (sometimes prohibitively) expensive, and it is argued that those with responsibility for dredging are being required to pay for polluting activities upstream in the river basin, for which they were not responsible, and which may have happened decades ago [8, 9]. Ultimately, increased costs associated with dredging impinge on economic activity and growth [10]. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Edited by Philip N. Owens Sustainable Management of Sediment Resources: Sediment Management at the River Basin Scale 31