Water guardian group challenges plant consent
Doubtless Bay catchment guardianship group Clean Waters to the Sea (CWTS) says it will challenge the legality of the new resource consents for the Far North District Council’s wastewater treatment plant at Taipa.
Trustee (and submitter) Andreas Kurmann said CWTS could not see any improvement in water quality even after the 10-year process, while the commissioners had granted an eightyear consent with pollution parameters unchanged from the original consent that expired in 2008.
Worse, they had doubled the allowable discharge volume from a plant that was already demonstratively not coping.
The decision, he added, ignored the “extensive” CWTS submission, the commissioners citing confusion in justifying their ignoring the “economically sound option” of electro coagulation EC2 water-cleaning technology that had been trialled successfully at the Taipa over the past year.
“I cannot understand how the commissioners could be confused, because all our evidence was based on the scientific data that our electro coagulation EC2 trial produced,” Mr Kurmann said. “We showed that we achieved safe levels of nitrates, phosphorus, ammonia and bacteria before discharge from the wastewater plant, so what could be clearer?
“The worst aspect of this report is the absence of any consideration of phosphorus, which is the driving contaminate of algal blooms. All over the world waterways are being cleaned up with strict rules on phosphorus, but here we still ignore our most serious clean water problem. The NRC consent process was set up because of objections to water pollution from the wastewater plant, but then it fails to address that very issue. This is unacceptable.”
The decision focused on discharge options, which was a predominant focus of the original 50 submissions in opposition to the consent in 2010, but that was a decade ago, and since then the EC2 trial had been shown to be a cheap and effective solution.
“This supersedes that original focus on disposal options, and makes the commissioners’ decision to designate the CWTS information as ‘new evidence,’ that is unable to be considered, both counter-productive and very unwise,” he added.
“The same reason was given for not considering our photographic evidence of algal blooms, both within the wastewater plant and the receiving environment. Yet ‘new evidence’ within the FNDC submission was accepted. This is inexplicable and unbalanced.”
It is for those reasons that CWTS rejected the legality of the decision, and together with Mana o Te Wai Hapu¯ Integration Roopu, a group of four hapu¯ submitters, it had lodged an appeal with NRC, as not just an issue for the Far North but a test case for the country.
“We have the technology to achieve clean water, and are determined to see it used, not only in wastewater plants but on farms as well,” Mr Kurmann said.
“It is breakthrough technology that achieves not only clean water from contaminated sources, but, being cheaper, will save a lot of money for both ratepayers and farmers in comparison to current water treatment practices that actually don’t work.”
CWTS also wanted the working group with Nga¯ti Kahu and FNDC representatives include the broader community.