Taniwha eats river rubbish
A 12-year-old girl is calling out farmers who pollute waterways with plastic silage wrapping.
Lauren Geer has taken a stand after finding 65 per cent of the rubbish floating down Pirongia’s Kaniwhaniwha stream was plastic waste from farms.
‘‘I was shocked and a bit angry because I know it’s going to harm something,’’ Lauren said. ‘‘There was so much and I was quite cross about it.’’
Silage is fermented, high moisture grass used to feed farm animals. It’s wrapped tightly in plastic or covered with a plastic sheet to reduce oxygen flow to the feed.
It was in waterways, wrapped around trees, on fences, caught on rocks and left in heaps on farms.
Frustration inspired her to engineer a water-based trap that catches rubbish floating downstream, aptly named the Rubbish Taniwha, to defend the waterways.
It won the Year 7 and 8 Junior Invention and the McGowan special award – Judges Choice at the NIWA Waikato Science and Technology Fair, in August.
On average, it caught 2.8kg of debris a week – 65 per cent silage wrap, 30 per cent household rubbish and five per cent leaf litter.
Downstream on Quarry Rd,
Murray Anderson, 61, switched to recycling his wrap after two decades of burning the waste on his dairy farm. His plastic off-cuts are neatly folded and placed in a large bag to be collected.
‘‘It’s just a way to get rid of your rubbish,’’ Anderson said. ‘‘There’s only so many holes you can dig.
‘‘The black smoke is not really a good look. The cost [of recycling] is not that bad really ... and you sleep better at night.’’
A few years ago a flood sent some poorly placed silage wrap floating downstream. It took a year to remove it from the waterway and his farm. You can’t catch every piece that flies off, but farmers aren’t the ones ruining the waterway, he said.
‘‘It’s the people up there swimming. They just biff their rubbish and go. It’s so frustrating, I’ve actually sworn at a few of them ... and it’s getting worse every year.’’
Farmers can recycle the wrap through Plasback.
In the last financial year, 2400 tonnes of plastic was recycled nationwide, programme manager Chris Hartshorne said. About 90 per cent of that was silage wrap.
Waikato Regional Council allows the burning of silage wrap if the smoke doesn’t bother anyone surrounding the property, but a review is underway to change the late nineties policy to current standards.