Coast bottling plant boost for struggling town
There may soon be signs of life in a dormant, largely shuttered West Coast coal mining town: a water bottling plant.
It is the latest in a series of unlikely ventures involving bulk water exports, an industry thriving on lax regulations that allow easy access to large quantities of water.
Blair Colligan, from Waimangaroa in the Buller district, owns a company given resource consent to take and bottle 1.3 billion litres of water each year for the next quarter century.
It is one of the largest known water bottling consents, in terms of volume, in New Zealand. The consent costs $63 per year.
He and his business partner, Gillian Bearman, have permission to take and use groundwater for a water bottling plant, according to the consent the West Coast Regional Council granted in March.
Colligan and Bearman confirmed they planned a water bottling plant, which they said would create 50 jobs and diversify a struggling region.
Waimangaroa, which has a population of about 300, went into sharp decline after the Denniston mine, once the largest in the country, closed in the late 1960s. The township once had a school, shop and pub, but all have closed.
It was a second chance for Colligan, who recently finished a prison sentence for his role in a West Coast drug ring police broke up nearly a decade ago.
He was jailed for nearly three and a half years in 2013, after trial delays. He said it was ‘‘a terrible mistake’’ and he had turned his life around.
‘‘It’s something I did in the past and I’m really ashamed of it,’’ he said. ‘‘I truly do regret it’’.
Water bottling has become a source of hope for some on the West Coast, after the coal mining crash and uncertainty around dairy.
Further down the West Coast, near Haast, a group of locals plan to pipe water from the edge of a national park onto overseas-bound ships – one of the largest such projects in the world.
Colligan and Bearman hoped their water bottling plant would reverse the downturn.
‘‘[We] wanted to find a way to help the local coasters and create a thriving business within a sustainable industry, especially using the resource the West Coast is renowned for, which is high rainfall and ultimately water,’’ they said in a joint statement.
While it was cheap to get a resource consent, setting up a plant was expensive, the said.
‘‘There is a substantial financial contribution required for the set up and ongoing costs of a bottling plant, for local supply or export, costing millions, which is why so many companies are not successful getting off the ground.’’
Under the brand name NZ Fresh, the company says the water is the ‘‘freshest that New Zealand has to offer’’ and comes from the ‘‘most remote, untouched locations of the Paparoa Ranges’’.
The resource consent is tied to a site alongside the Waimangaroa river, at the base of the Denniston Plateau.
Critics have targeted the way water is allocated to industries such as water bottling, which pay virtually nothing for access to a public resource.
The Government has resisted putting a price on water, referring the issue to a technical working group.
Earlier this week it was revealed a company with overseas interests had bought a former wool scour in Christchurch, which came with rights to extract 1.5b litres of water per year.
The company intends to bottle water at the site, according to documents.
Several other contentious bottling ventures are being explored in rural South Island spots.
Colligan, a former dairy farmer, said bottling water used less water, more efficiently, than dairy farming.
If the business was successful, they would give back through sponsorships and donations to local groups, they said.