In the dispute over the silt in the port of Hamburg, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony reached an agreement on Tuesday. This was confirmed by Hamburg’s Senator for the Environment, Jens Kerstan (Green Party), at noon in City Hall. According to this, the Hanseatic city may dump the silt, which has to be dredged out of the Elbe so that large ships can pass through it, in the E3 buoy in the North Sea from the beginning of next year.
In a digital round, the heads of department responsible for the environment and the heads of the state chancellery spoke about the problem of disposing of the dredged silt. Hamburg’s plans to dump silt in front of Scharhörn on Hamburg territory near a nature reserve were particularly controversial. This met with resistance from the state governments in Kiel and Hanover.
However, Kerstan made it clear to journalists that the topic was off the table for the time being. “It’s not a priority anymore,” he said. The Hamburg Senator for the Environment said he was pleased that an agreement had been reached. Because the process that is mainly used at the moment, in which Hamburg deposits the silt off the island of Nessand in the Elbe, is bad for the port because it is expensive and also bad for the environment. With the next high tide, parts of the silt would be washed back to Hamburg. In Hamburg, the term “circulatory dredging” has therefore become established for this type of sediment dumping.
Kerstan thanked the colleagues in Schleswig-Holstein for the “generous offer” that Hamburg could unload the silt back into the E3 buoy off Heligoland. The responsible authorities in the Hanseatic city have also done this with parts of the silt that has accumulated.
However, the agreed maximum quantities were exhausted and there has not yet been a new agreement. So now the concession of Schleswig-Holstein, which, according to Kerstan, came about in a “very constructive” conversation. “It’s good that we have now met at the political level,” said the Green politician. So far, it was mainly the state secretaries and state councilors who had negotiated solutions.
In the long term, however, they want to look for new delivery points in the North Sea together with the two neighboring countries. Concrete projects should be in place by autumn next year. From Kerstan’s point of view, for example, areas of the foreign trade zone could be considered. However, it is particularly important that the three countries have agreed to end circular dredging in the long term.
The associations BUND, NABU and WWF, which are part of the Living Tide Elbe Action Alliance, welcomed the agreement in the dispute over the Elbe silt. It is welcomed that “Hamburg is giving in to its neighbors and refraining from dumping contaminated dredged material from the Elbe and the port near Scharhörn.” In this way, sensitive areas on the edge of the Wadden Sea World Heritage Site are spared “toxic port silt”. The next step must be to “permanently rule out Scharhörn as a dumping site”.
At the same time, according to the environmental associations, there is still an urgent need for action for the Elbe ecosystem. “The three federal states are responsible for quickly working out a solution for the homemade silt problem with the federal government, which not only serves the interests of the federal and state governments from an economic point of view, but also the interests of nature.” For this, dredging in the Elbe must be kept to a minimum be reduced.
