Righting our landfill wrongs
Not many of us would stand at the mouth of Westland’s remote Fox River, look inland towards the shrinking glacier at its source, and feel we are gazing into our future.
But it is a future we must consider, while acknowledging the sins of the past.
Earlier this year, heavy rain and a rising Fox River ripped through a long-forgotten, disused landfill, vomiting its contents along many kilometres of riverbed and coastline.
Over many months close to 900 Defence Force staff, Department of Conservation workers and volunteers laboured to clean up the site, removing more than 13,000 bags of rubbish.
Now the Government is teaming up with regional councils to take a harder look at other vulnerable landfills, their proximity to waterways and the risk of another disaster. A multi-agency project led by the Ministry for the Environment will investigate options such as protection from erosion, better containment of sites, or even removal of the contents of the landfill.
Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage believes there could be at least 112 ‘‘legacy landfill’’ sites. But because of a lack of foresight and the blissful ignorance of earlier times, not enough is known about where all these sites are, or exactly what was deposited.
This national stocktake of public, private and unofficial rubbish tips is a sensible idea as we plan
for a less than sensible future and the as-yetunknown full consequences of climate change.
What it finds is likely to challenge strong, longheld beliefs about this country’s bucolic past. A past often buried by a few inches of topsoil, a sprinkling of grass seed and a handful of ratepayerfunded riverside benches.
Fox River and its clean-up represents another uncomfortable strand of that future. The turbulence that marks the river’s thrust into the wider Tasman Sea is a metaphor for the tiny Westland District Council’s struggle for help from central government.
The latter is picking up the tab for the national tally-up of rubbish tips and risks. But it looks like the councils will be expected to pay for the more expensive remediation of those vulnerable sites.
Westland, with a small population and even smaller rating base, struggled with the cost of the Fox River clean-up; the Government struggled with the enthusiasm to support that effort. Sage believes the sites remain the responsibility of local government, even though, technically, many of those bodies came into being only in 1989, long after many of the tips were established, or even closed.
One solution may be to raise the cost of remediation from charges paid by current tip users. That too is one possible future in the face of climate change: a more targeted funding of the burden of mitigating that change.