A well-designed approach for the selection of dredged material (DM) management option decisions identifies the trade-offs among various risks, costs, and benefits of multiple management alternatives. Whatever tools are applied to make and communicate decisions, it is critical that decision criteria and the parameters or indicators that are used to score or rank them are relevant, clear, and exhaustive, but not redundant. Alongside the more “traditional” ones, new criteria are emerging which consider statutory drivers, multi-scale assessments, sustainability and ecosystem issues. Increasingly, policies demand more sustainable sediment management (including a prioritization of beneficial re-use), waste minimization, and a consideration of the waste hierarchy. A consideration of such factors requires that DM management approaches are classified in terms of the waste hierarchy and that these classifications are used to develop transparent and meaningful indicators, criteria, and scoring methods that can be used to inform decisions. Waste hierarchy classifications and definitions (pollution prevention, processing, re-use, recycling, and disposal), are discussed and a framework for DM management option and technology classification is proposed. Methodologies are presented by which complete management scenarios, with multiple phases or components, can be ranked and scored based upon the fates of all project fractions in terms of the waste hierarchy. A hypothetical case study is presented in which 15 DM management scenarios are evaluated using two scoring systems. These had different strengths and weaknesses, but both allowed for consistent and transparent comparisons of complex DM management scenarios in terms of the waste hierarchy that could be used for project comparison and communication. The goal of any indicator or score designed to represent a decision criterion is to provide a relative measure to allow decision makers and stakeholders to balance potentially competing decision drivers for potentially vastly different management scenarios in a level, consistent and transparent manner. As the waste hierarchy is likely to become increasingly important as a regulatory driver, and as a factor that can be used to address sustainability, it is important to be clear about the assumptions and definitions that are being used to make these concepts relevant to DM and other aspects of sediment management; this paper provides a framework for discussion.