New owner for Paritutu site
Global agrichemical giant Corteva insists it is not walking away from the responsibility of cleaning up its controversial former production site at Paritutu in New Plymouth, despite today announcing it is transferring ownership to American multinational Dow.
Demolition of the site has been ongoing since August, a month before Corteva, previously the agricultural arm of Dow Dupont, made a commitment to thoroughly test and clean up the site.
From the 1960s through to 1987, Ivon Watkins (later Ivon Watkins-dow) made the herbicide 2,4, 5-T – which contained the toxic dioxin TCDD at Paritutu.
The herbicide was a key component of Agent Orange – the defoliant used by the United States military in the Vietnam War – and has been linked to cancers and birth defects.
In the mid-1980s, elevated levels of TCDD were found in the soil on the site’s boundaries with reserve land and a residential street.
Cynthia Alexander, Corteva’s head of communications in Australasia and the Pacific, said ownership of the site would move to Dow once the demolition was complete at the end of the year.
Dow makes plastics and agricultural products and is among the three largest chemical producers in the world. ‘‘The remediation work for the site, that responsibility was already still with Dow, so we are not washing our hands of the site,’’ Alexander said.
Transferring the legal ownership of the site back to Dow allowed the company to get on with the remediation work and testing without having to continually consult with Corteva, she said.
‘‘It makes it far less complicated,’’ she said.
Dow public affairs manager Kow Sin Yee said the deal gave the company ‘‘100% ownership’’ of the site’s cleanup and all responsibilities that went with it, including ‘‘all environmental liability’’.
‘‘We understand that testing and remediation of this site is a priority for the local community and are committed to remediate the site in a safe and sustainable way,’’ Karen Dobson, Dow managing director for Australia and New Zealand, said.
An outline of that remediation work and future testing would be provided to stakeholders in New Plymouth next week by representatives of Dow, which operates 104 manufacturing sites in 31 countries and employs about 35,700 people.
Dow’s global product sales reached $55 billion last year.
New Plymouth mayor Neil Holdom was told of Corteva’s decision to transfer ownership yesterday and believed the decision formed part of the contractual obligations Dow had always had to clean up the site. ‘‘They won’t be able to sneak out of town after dark and those clauses where liability [for clean-up] sits have kicked in and that liability will be held by Dow now,’’ he said.
‘‘I think that is probably appropriate and the expectations on Dow are exactly the same as Corteva and given the scale of Dow, I would anticipate they will rise to the challenge and meet their environmental commitments.’’
Holdom said the New Plymouth District Council would be looking for a comprehensive site testing plan with an independent oversight from Dow representatives when they visited.
‘‘Not just where manufacturing occurred, in terms of under and around the building sites, but around the boundary and across the whole site, given the indications we have had about drums being buried and the contamination being quite broad and quite significant,’’ he said.
‘‘This work is really, really important for our community because we have houses and a coastal marine reserve right there.’’