The North Sea coast protects our country from the sea. The beach and dunes also provide space for nature, recreation, and, for example, drinking water extraction. The coast erodes because wind, waves, and currents carry away sand. If we do nothing about this, we will lose more and more land to the sea and our coastal defenses will be weakened.

On behalf of Rijkswaterstaat, we are strengthening the coast by means of sand replenishment. Dredgers bring sand from the North Sea to the beach or to the seabed just off the coast.

This is how we keep the coastline in place. As a result, the Netherlands remains safe and our country does not shrink. In recent months, we have been working on about 6 km of beach in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.

How do we work?
We start by extracting sand at sea, which we do here with T.S.H.D. Charlock, one of our trailing suction hopper dredgers. The sand is ‘sucked up’ from the seabed by the ship. When the hopper is full, we sail towards the coast and the sand is pressed from the hopper onto the beach using a pressure pipe.

All that sand is then spread across the beach using heavy equipment such as bulldozers and cranes. In this way, we restore the coastline, which will protect Zeeuws-Vlaanderen from the elements for years to come.

It is important in our work to take local residents into account, and especially in areas like this, nature too! Together with Rijkswaterstaat, we pay a lot of attention to this. Because the work continues 24 hours a day, we work at night with bat-friendly lighting. Before starting the work, we also check whether there are any nesting birds that should not be disturbed and we plan our work outside the bathing season to limit the impact on tourism.

In total, we sprayed more than 900,000 cubic meters of sand during this work. We did this on the beach at Cadzand, between Cadzand harbor and Verdronken Zwarte Polder (3.6 km), and on the beach at Nieuwesluis (2.5 km). In 2026, we will tackle the beach at Dishoek!