‘It just breaks your heart’
Volunteers from all walks of life have converged on the Fox River, but face a herculean task. Jo Carroll and Chris Skelton document their progress.
Volunteers crouch over huge piles of river debris to unpick plastic rubbish entangled in the branches, logs, silt and rock. Their orange hivis vests dot the landscape of the braided Fox River which is polluted with 50 years of rubbish from the Fox Glacier landfill.
Rubbish was strewn across 1269 hectares of the Fox River bed and 64 kilometres of coastline after a storm in March exposed a disused landfill. Four months later, there is still so much work to do.
Since the Department of Conservation (DOC) took over management of the environmental cleanup, up to 90 volunteers a day and the New Zealand Defence Force have boosted the efforts.
Stuff joined 64 volunteers from all over the country in the Fox River on Wednesday.
Volunteers are housed in shared but comfortable dorm rooms at the Ivory Towers backpackers in Fox Glacier.
They must get to the West Coast themselves and provide their own breakfast, but accommodation, lunch and dinner are paid for by DOC.
It is just after daybreak when volunteers make their way from the backpackers to the nearby DOC office for an 8.30am health and safety briefing.
Hi-vis vests and safety gloves are handed out as DOC operations manager Iain Graham runs through the risks for the day.
He warns volunteers to only pick up items they can identify, like plastics or metals.
Any suspicious objects identified as potentially hazardous like asbestos are to be assessed by a DOC team leader, the location recorded, and the object picked up by specialised staff or an external contractor.
A school group from Northland who have spent four days volunteering are farewelled at Wednesday’s briefing.
Panguru Area School principal Mina Pomare-Peita says she brought eight year 7 to 10 students on the two-day drive from Northland to Fox Glacier to let them see the huge problem plastics are for the environment.
‘‘Being out there in the river working, picking up rubbish, seeing it for themselves was amazing. I can’t describe in English what it felt like to see the rubbish in the river. It just breaks your heart.’’
She says the students benefited so much from the experience she will be returning with the older age groups, after her two-day drive back to the Far North.
Fox Glacier Guides buses and the Defence Force vehicles ferry volunteers from the DOC office to the river. The rain is lightly falling, but with wet weather gear on, the volunteers scramble with their sacks and trowels over the rock, silt and water to large piles of river debris. Rubbish is tangled up in the tree stumps, branches and silt. The rubbish is mostly soft plastics.
Supermarket bags, now banned, are buried in the silt and when pulled with any force, they disintegrate into tiny bits. There are parts of old cars, plastic pipes, clothing, bread bags, drink cans, nappies, and what seems like millions of individual butter and milk containers from hotels.
The area being worked on is about 5km from the dump site and 15km from the sea. It is one of the areas earmarked as a priority by DOC to clear before spring rains create another flood and wash the rubbish out to sea.
DOC has portable toilets, first aid, water and hand-washing facilities set up along the riverbed. Large wool sacks are set up at intervals for the volunteers to empty their sacks into. The sacks get heavy quickly as the rubbish is covered in wet sand.
Blasts on a whistle herald a morning tea of hot drinks and carrot cake and lunch of sandwiches, which are provided by a local cafe.
Shelley Alexander is up from Wanaka with her two children, Kerah and Niall. Alexander says she lived in Fox Glacier for 18 years, so is upset to see what could be her own rubbish polluting a beautiful place that is close to her heart. She also wants her children to learn a valuable lesson during the school holidays.
‘‘We really need to rethink what we have in our households and this is a really raw reminder of what we need to not use. First-hand they are picking up plastic bags, they’re picking up shampoo bottles, old bits of rubbish, all sorts of things. It’s a great visual tangible lesson for them [to see] what impact those items are having on the environment.’’
‘‘I wanted to show them that volunteering has major benefits. It’s good for the soul to get out and help. You meet some amazing people when you give back. These people are here from all over New Zealand to help and that’s so warming,’’ she says.
The volunteers are people of different ages, fitness levels, professions and nationalities with one common goal, of trying to get the river back to its former glory. There is the grandmother from the North Island who brought her 12-year-old grandson to Fox Glacier for three weeks, the nomadic people who live in motorhomes, the retirees, the orchardist who left his apple trees in Hawke’s Bay to help for a week, the students and the foreigners on working holiday visas.
Napier woman Denise Lahood is spending three months housesitting on the West Coast and signed up when she heard the call for volunteers.
She now spends three or four days every week picking up rubbish on the river and socialising with volunteers at night. Dinner vouchers are provided to volunteers for a choice of two Fox Glacier restaurants.
‘‘We had bingo at one of the local pubs and it was just the best night. Everyone is so friendly and having fun, sharing stories. It’s been lifechanging for me,’’ she says.
‘‘I think it’s wrong for me to say I love it but I am loving coming here, feeling like you’re doing something, feeling like you are making a difference even though you think, ‘Oh my God, are we ever going to get this done?’. But just being here making a difference and meeting the most incredible people. Honestly it’s been awesome.’’
She encourages other Kiwis to get involved.
‘‘I don’t think from people looking at social media or the news you cannot get a real sense of what it’s like here, you have to come. I think if every Kiwi spent a day here it would change their thinking around plastic usage. The plastic is insanity. It’s blown my mind. You have to dig for stuff. It’s not just walking along picking up rubbish. There’s huge storm debris so you’re having to dig it out, it’s unbelievable.’’
She says volunteers are going over areas again after diggers go through and churn up more rubbish from underneath.
While all the volunteers are happy to be helping clean up the river, some express anger at the Westland District Council and the Government for not acting sooner. The council was initially in charge of the cleanup but stopped at the end of May because it had no more money to continue and could not put any more cost onto its 6552 ratepayers.
One woman says the council misused money because it paid contractors $30 an hour to pick up the rubbish and had spent almost $200,000 on helicopters flying the contractors to remote areas. Another says she is angry that mayor Bruce Smith enjoyed a week’s holiday in Fiji while volunteers continued the cleanup.
Smith says the people who had begun as volunteers were paid a ‘‘fair wage’’ for the work being done while council was overseeing the operation.
His holiday with his wife and grandchildren was his private life and irrelevant to the landfill issue.
He says a plan to remove the remaining landfill, estimated to be 11,000 cubic metres, will be presented to councillors at their meeting on July 25.
He does not know how much it will cost to remove the landfill, but the cost of putting the rubbish into Hokitika’s Butler’s landfill would be about $30 a tonne.
He hopes the council could remove other at-risk landfills in the district and put them into the proposed Waste to Energy plant proposed for Hokitika by Renew Energy Ltd. A public meeting on the plant, which would burn rubbish at high temperatures to create electricity, will be held in Hokitika on July 25.
Invercargill volunteer Bruce Hitchcock says the council needs to remove the remaining landfill before the next flood washes more rubbish into the river.
‘‘What they need to do is remove all their rubbish with big machines and get it out of there; take it to a proper lined pit. It’s a big job but it doesn’t matter how much it costs. The Government will have to dip into the emergency bag to do it. There’s not enough ratepayers here to do it and not enough of them to clean it up either,’’ he said.
The Government deployed 70 Defence Force personnel, vehicles and aircraft to help the cleanup effort.
Major Denis Petre says the
soldiers are already helping pick up rubbish and all-terrain vehicles are moving people and carting the large bags of rubbish away. More personnel and aircraft will be arriving on Monday and will be going to remote beaches between the Karangarua River and O¯ ka¯ rito to remove rubbish.
DOC ranger Iain Graham says there are layers and layers of rubbish on the riverbed.
‘‘We are going to have to implement a monitoring and clearing programme for upcoming years. I mean this stuff is going to be washing out of here for years. It’s a long-term job.’’
So far, 1000 volunteer days have resulted in 60 tonnes of rubbish being collected from 116 hectares. The total area to clear is 1269ha of riverbed and 64km of coastline.
‘‘It’s a huge job and we definitely couldn’t do it without the volunteers. They’ve all got their reasons for being here and they are pretty phenomenal to hear and that is where my motivation comes from.
‘‘Coming out here you get to see the impact soft plastics are having on the environment. It’s pretty heartbreaking to see bread bags, bottles from 30 years ago and you can still see the expiry date on them,’’ he says.
Waimate teacher Linda Schofield, who gave up her school holidays to volunteer, says some of the plastic is in perfect condition despite being buried in the landfill between 20 and 50 years ago.
‘‘We think we’re clean and green but we’re not. We will pick this up but it will just be put into another hole in the ground and we need to stop that. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to pick up the next landfill that opens up and the next and the next,’’ she says.
‘‘You could get down in the dumps about it but you’ve got to have hope and that’s why we’re here. We have to reduce our packaging now. Don’t just talk about it, do your bit.
‘‘Even doing something simple like making your own yoghurt or bread would save so much plastic. The biggest thing I’m finding are bread bags. It’s all about convenience and our lifestyle . . .
‘‘Before we buy something, think, ‘Who will be picking this up in 50 years’ time?’.’’