Posted on November 9, 2021
Although the new Glass City Metropark has generated a lot of excitement over in East Toledo, it has a downside that Metroparks Toledo must address.
Its soil.
No, it’s not horribly polluted, toxic, or anything like that. The soil that remained after bulldozers cleared the site is considered clean and safe.
But because of the site’s past industrial uses, the Glass City Metropark’s dirt has a fair amount of fly ash mixed into it and lacks the kind of nutrients necessary for trees and plants to take root and prosper. The few which have been planted aren’t growing in as fast and as quickly as park district officials would like.
“The soil on site is essentially inert and not suitable for growing plants,” Tim Schetter, Metroparks Toledo natural resources director, said. “The dirt there is not suitable for trees, prairie grass, or anything.”
That all is expected to change next spring when Metroparks Toledo becomes the biggest customer of the Great Lakes Dredged Material Center for Innovation, a North Toledo site where some of the nutrient-rich sediment dredged from the Toledo Harbor shipping channel was deposited in 2016 and 2017.
The Center for Innovation was announced in 2014 by then-Gov. John Kasich amid great fanfare after Michigan and Ohio officials had spent nearly three decades haggling with the Army Corps of Engineers over its longstanding practice of dumping out in western Lake Erie’s open water most of what it dredged from the channel.
Open-lake disposal of dredged material — mostly nutrient-rich farm soil that makes it way into the Maumee River — was eventually phased out in 2020, but not until the federal government finally agreed to put most of it into the confined disposal facility near Oregon called Facility 3.
The center is not big enough to hold anywhere near all of the 800,000 to 1.2 million cubic yards of silt dredged each year to keep the shipping channel open for Great Lakes navigation. Toledo’s port is the shallowest, and thus most heavily dredged, in the Great Lakes system.
The Center for Innovation was created to help promote what officials were hoping would be an environmental twofer: a beneficial reuse. That’s when a new use is found for something that would otherwise be considered a waste product.
Research to date shows that what’s in that North Toledo center is pretty comparable to farm soil once it’s dewatered, a process Joe Cappel, the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority’s vice president for business development, said can take years.
So earlier this year, Metroparks Toledo applied for and, on Sept. 8, received a five-year permit from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency allowing the park district to remove as much as 30,000 cubic yards of the 70,000 cubic yards of dredged material that has been slowly drying out at the Center for Innovation.
The park district moved the first 1,500 cubic yards over to Glass City Metropark in mid-October as part of a pilot study. If all goes as planned, it will begin moving a lot more in the spring, Mr. Schetter said.
Think of it as nutrient-rich topsoil, except it’s sediment dug out of the shipping channel.
“It would be astronomically expensive to add top soil,” Mr. Schetter explained. “We can use that material to reinvigorate the soil.”
The river is often called the “Muddy Maumee” because of the strong winds and thunderstorms that push farm topsoil and clay into the water, turning it into the color — if not consistency — of chocolate milk.
The state of Ohio, through Gov. Mike DeWine’s H2Ohio program, works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and others in helping farmers keep as much soil on their land as possible so the phosphorus and nitrogen nutrients in it don’t spur algae growth in Lake Erie and the river.
But Metroparks Toledo hopes it can put much of that which has escaped into good use — and in the process, improve the soil health of its most ambitious project to date, Glass City Metropark, where it also has stormwater wetlands to curb runoff.
“The primary focus is just to get things to grow,” Mr. Schetter said, adding that the park district has “generally had pretty poor success” so far in getting trees and plants established there.
The park district wasn’t blindsided by the situation.
Metroparks Toledo knew going in that the massive Glass City Metropark project and its future five-mile Glass City Riverwalk would have some unique challenges. But it was willing to do what it takes because of a commitment it made years ago to develop parks in historically underserved areas, Mr. Schetter said.
With last fall’s opening of the Manhattan Marsh Metropark in North Toledo, it achieved its longstanding goal of having a Metropark within five miles of every Lucas County resident.
“We’re not dealing with any issues that are contaminants,” Mr. Schetter said.
While the park district gets the dewatered silt free of charge from the port authority, “the expense comes with hauling it,” he said.
Yet-to-be published research by Angelica Vazquez-Ortega, an assistant Bowling Green State University geochemistry professor, bears out the belief that the dredged material is benign and mostly displaced farm soil.
A two-page fact sheet she produced shows that soybeans, based on greenhouse experiments, grow just as well if not better in dredged material. Equally important: Contaminants weren’t being taken up by plants.
“In general, it seems if there are contaminants in the dredged material, they are not bioaccumulating in the soybeans,” Ms. Vazquez-Ortega told The Blade.
Dredged material these days is “relatively clean” because the Corps of Engineers dug historically polluted industrial waste out of the Maumee years ago. The top layer of sediment filling in the shipping channel now appears to be coming almost exclusively from farms, she said.
“It’s pretty much fresh,” Ms. Vazquez-Ortega said. “They’re removing it constantly.”
Her fact sheets’ second page also shows the heavy-metal concentrations in the Toledo area’s dredged silt — aluminum, iron, manganese, chromium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, arsenic, and lead — now resemble those of farm sediment near the Wood County village of Hoytville, Ohio.
“The numbers are very similar to background numbers,” Ms. Vazquez-Ortega said.
That’s important, she added, because — despite parents’ preventive efforts — young children sometimes eat dirt.
Some of the remaining dredged material at the Center for Innovation is being transported to Bowling Green for experiments Ms. Vazquez-Ortega is planning with corn. And some, Mr. Cappel said, has been used by a contractor at the former Riverside Hospital in North Toledo.
“With Glass City Metropark being almost across the river, it made sense to use material there. It’s not a toxic waste material. It’s not sludge,” he said. “The challenge is finding enough inherent value in the material to offset the cost of transporting it and handling it.”
Mr. Cappel said his goal is for all the dewatered dredge material at the North Toledo site to be used, and new markets will be created for it.
“We want this to be a resource and not a waste product,” he said.
Hauling in traditional topsoil for the Glass City Metropark would cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Mr. Schetter said.
“The short answer is we knew that there were issues there,” he said. “We knew this was going to be a challenge. But we’re confident this is one we can work through over time.”
The Ohio EPA said in a prepared statement the permit it issued to Metroparks “is a great example of state and local agencies working together, partnering on [a] project that promotes plant growth and improves soil fertility.”
