New Zealand's piles of historic rubbish - with a sea view

Monday, 8 April 2019

Drone footage shows full extent of the damage to the Waiho Bridge, near Franz Josef on the West Coast, in March 2019.

Rubbish strewn across West Coast beaches after a nearby dump burst open is a shocking reminder of New Zealand's dirty past and may be a sign of things to come after extreme weather events. Paul Gorman reports.

Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage put it best, distressed like so many others about rubbish and junk draped across dozens of kilometres of wild West Coast beaches.

'Rubbish doesn't go away just because you bury it,' she said.

It certainly doesn't. There's tonnes and tonnes of it in the historic, 'legacy', landfills which pockmark the New Zealand landscape, many of them next to or within a kilometre of beaches. And that doesn't begin to take account of all the old, closed dumps hidden within the banks of rivers that flow out to the coast.

These coastal tip sites are sitting ducks for destruction in the face of more extreme rainfall and storm surges as the climate continues to change.

Volunteers, DOC and council staff face a huge job cleaning up beaches strewn with rubbish from an old dump near Fox Glacier township.

It was one of these closed rubbish tips, the Fox Glacier Township Landfill in South Westland, which last week shook any complacency that our predecessors' junk had, like them, gone for good.

Swollen and angry after three-quarters of a metre of rain fell in its catchment, the Fox River cut into a bank and ripped open the old dump, dislodging and removing plastic, burnt materials, car tyres, tins, engine batteries and old shoes.

Some of the rubbish that has spread along South Westland beaches from the closed dump at Fox Glacier.

The junk, some of which has now been confirmed as hazardous, washed downstream and into the Cook/Weheka River, and was then deposited, heartbreakingly, along the river bed and over about 50km of coastal cove and crag, nook and cranny, from the river mouth northeast to at least Ōkārito and about 10km southwest too.

Local volunteers, Department of Conservation staff and employees of the Westland District Council (WDC) and West Coast Regional Council (WCRC) have been struggling since to remove the rubbish, which, as Forest & Bird chief executive Kevin Hague points out, is now strung across internationally revered beaches belonging to the Westland Tai Poutini National Park and the Waiau Glacier Coast Marine Reserve, and adjacent to the Ōkārito Mataitai Reserve.

Signs at the asbestos-contaminated Kaiaua landfill on the Firth of Thames in August 2014, which was being eroded by wave action.

The potential impact on wildlife is what's worrying many. There are seals and Hector's dolphins in the area, as well as penguins, other sea birds and kiwi. And how much more rubbish is still out to sea, waiting to drift in on the tide, is unknown.

While the district council says it has shored up the closed landfill by lining the eroded section with geo-cloth and bolstering the bank with rock from the river, staunching the flow of debris into the river, concerns remain about what toxic substances have been released from the dump and are still in the river bed.

As New Zealanders get their heads around the scale of this eco-disaster, it is timely to remember the Fox River dump is just one of more than 100 legacy landfills around the New Zealand coast.

Unfortunately, in our not-so-distant past and in less environmentally enlightened times, rubbish tips were seen as a great way of 'reclaiming' land. For that reason, many were sited on the coastal fringe, to build out into the water.

A good number of these landfills were filled before plastic became prevalent in the 1950s and '60s. However, they remain repositories for toxic goods, such as dangerous agri-chemicals, old car batteries and engine parts, asbestos and lead paint.

Asbestos lying on the beach at Hector, north of Westport, after storm damage to a secret coastal dump early in 2018.

The WCRC says there are another 13 closed landfill sites on the coast located near a river or the coastal marine area.

The list sounds like a tiki tour of the coast – starting in the south at Neils Beach, near Jackson Bay, and moving north to Hannah's Clearing, Franz Josef, Ross, Otira, Cobden, Ikamatua, Mawheraiti, Reefton, Maruia, Inangahua, Westport and Birchfield.

The West Coast Regional Council says it did not know about the dump at Hector, north of Westport, from which asbestos escaped following storms in early 2018.

A regional council spokeswoman said there was also a site at Hector, north of Westport, which operated before resource consenting.

The council had been unaware of this dump – from which asbestos escaped on to the beach after rough weather early in 2018 – and was now working with the Buller District Council to manage it.

One of two landfills located on an eroding cliff face near Oamaru. Coastal erosion has caused the contents of the landfill to fall on to the beach.

'While we know of these sites, it is possible that there are other locations that we do not know about until something occurs, as has happened in the Buller Bay.'

The WDC says the Fox River dump was started by locals in 1948 and authorised in the 1960s. It was sited in an old channel 'some distance away' from the main part of the river.

Grey District mayor Tony Kokshoorn and Minister of Civil Defence Kris Faafoi at Cobden Beach where an old rubbish dump was eroded into the sea during ex-tropical cyclone Fehi in February 2018.

The huge nor'west rainstorm of March 25-26-27 had forced the swollen river through about 40m of bush, causing the land under the old site to erode.

'Cleaning up as much of the rubbish as possible will take a considerable amount of time. There will be rubbish that has been buried beneath debris from the storm, and the shifts in the tides or further rain events may result in more rubbish washing up.'

Rubbish on the beach at Cobden tip head and Shipwreck Point exposed when former tropical cyclone Fehi lashed the West Coast in February 2018.

On Monday afternoon, Westland District mayor Bruce Smith disputed the initial reports suggesting rubbish from the Fox River landfill had travelled as far as Fiordland.

'Aerial surveys during the last couple of days have confirmed the area affected is confined to about 50km of coastline, from approximately 10km south of the Fox River northward.'

Rubbish from the old Putorino landfill seeped into the Rangitikei River after it altered its course.

The rubbish on Fiordland beaches had been 'investigated and confirmed as not from the old Fox River landfill'.

The West Coast Tai Poutini Conservation Board's acting chairman, Dr Keith Morfett, says the board thought the district council's response had been 'inadequate and needs to be scaled up as a matter of urgency'.

Old TV sets and plastic rubbish lie among the piles of green waste at Patea Beach in Taranaki.

Morfett told Stuff there was a dearth of robust information about what was in the old dump and where it had actually gone.

'There is real potential for toxic chemicals to be released into the environment.

The Fox River legacy landfill site which has been damaged by floodwaters, allowing rubbish to flow downstream and on to West Coast beaches.

'The immediate recovery effort was swallowed up in the floods, but I think this is a disaster in itself. We have no clue – nobody knows what's within the landfill.'

There are plenty of unknowns. As news of the rubbish spill broke, it seemed unclear which council was responsible. The true extent of the beach pollution remains uncertain, difficult to categorise in such an isolated region. And there is a perplexing lack of centralised information about these blots on the New Zealand landscape.

Waste management consultant Lisa Eve of Eunomia says the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), which should be the national collector of such data, has been run down by years of a National government largely uninterested in environmental issues.

'They have had nine years of working for a government that had no interest in what they were doing. Until 18 months ago, we had a change of government … and the level of interest in waste and issues has changed, and that department is expected to do a huge amount of work they are not now resourced for.'

Forest & Bird conservation ambassador Dr Gerry McSweeney says there will be 'legacy landfills all over the place' across the West Coast and a national discussion is needed to get to grips with the issue.

'It is a question of getting the Ministry for the Environment, who should have a register of all of these, and district councils and regional councils to be going through all this really thoroughly and working out which ones will be exposed to hazards and what we have to do before the events such as happened at Fox Glacier happen again.'

Stuff contacted 17 regional and unitary councils to get maps or lists of their closed coastal landfills. Not all replied in time but most of those which did had worrying information to share.

In Northland there are 15 closed landfills within 1km of the coast. Otago has 27 'mostly low-risk' historic coastal dumps, Bay of Plenty has eight outside Tauranga, which has at least two dozen alone, and Taranaki has five. Waikato has 12, Nelson has one, at Atawhai, and Gisborne has four.

Environment Canterbury lists 57 coastal legacy landfills around the region, but says that does not include those in the Kaikōura and Hurunui districts and also that it is unclear how many of those 57 may be farm dumps.

Sage, who is also conservation minister, defends the WDC's efforts so far.

'They've got a lot of challenges there, with the state highway going out after the rain, and the bridge washed away. They have got a lot on their plate.'

The old Fox landfill was believed closed in 2001 and had a resource consent to discharge contaminants to land.

'Responsibility to ensure compliance with the resource consent falls to the regional council and the site was last monitored for effects in 2016. At this time, final capping was noted over the landfill, the site was fenced and there was no mention of any erosion issues,' she said.

Environmental Defence Society (EDS) chairman Gary Taylor says the West Coast is on the frontline of increasingly severe storms due to climate change, which could expose more 'time bombs waiting to go up'.

'How can the Government have confidence that the demonstrable effects of climate change at Fox are properly dealt with, when the West Coast Regional Council denies climate change is even happening? This is a case where ministers need to directly intervene if public funds are to be deployed to the region to fix the problem.'

Forest & Bird conservation advocacy manager Jennifer Miller says a Local Government New Zealand report on vulnerable infrastructure shows at least 110 known closed dumps around parts of the country will be exposed to the sea with just a 0.5 metre rise in average sea levels.

Eighty-eight are in the Auckland region, five in Nelson, nine in Otago and four in Canterbury.

'It isn't good enough to have councils around the country denying their responsibility to take climate change seriously, especially when some of those most in denial are also the most exposed to flooding and sea-level rise.

'The Ministry for the Environment has responsibility for leading this work and making sure councils are not consigning their residents and landscapes to more of these preventable ecological disasters.'

MfE has to provide 'clear guidance' to councils on what their responsibilities are, and the Government needs to fund that work, Miller says.

The chairwoman of Auckland Council's environment and community committee, Penny Hulse, says 'we've got heaps of these – tragically'.

'There's this slightly guilty secret of the closed landfill register. Pop some grass on the top of them, a couple of rugby posts and suddenly it's a sports field. But it's an old landfill now, and always will be.'

Sage says the introduction of the Resource Management Act (RMA) in the early 1990s ushered in a new way of thinking about waste.

'The terrible situation at Fox Glacier highlights that waste never 'goes away'.

'We need to proactively manage our resources and design waste out of our production system. Where waste is harmful and unavoidable it needs to be carefully managed.

'Like most countries, New Zealand has a history of old dump sites, legacy fill sites and other contaminated sites.

'Disposal of waste prior to the introduction of the RMA was mainly carried out in a large number of small local tips or dump sites. This was a low-cost, low-managed and relatively convenient method of disposal.

'The legacy we have now is that these sites were often located in areas where land was cheap or unwanted for development, pits were easy to dig to dispose of rubbish and away from housing areas.'

With the creation of MfE in 1986, more attention was paid to the adverse effects of landfills. A decade later, the Local Government Amendment Act specified that all territorial local authorities had to prepare waste management plans.

Requiring district councils to have resource consents for landﬁlls and other waste treatment facilities created a 'strong incentive to upgrade the standards of waste disposal across the country', Sage says.

'The expense of upgrading existing facilities, or constructing new facilities that met new consent conditions, resulted in the closure of many small local landfills, including on the West Coast, and the development of larger-scale, engineered 'regional' facilities, such as Kate Valley in North Canterbury, serving much larger catchments.'

Eve says these legacy landfills are 'probably the biggest problem we have with waste management and disposal'.

'There's a real lack of information about them and a real lack of central organisation that keeps control of them.

'Nobody in the country actually collates or summarises all of this information, so finding a central source is probably going to be very difficult.

'Also, this information probably only relates to the closed landfills that, a, the councils are aware of and, b, that are on public property. There are probably a number of historic closed landfills on private property that nobody knows about until something goes wrong.

'When most of these historic landfills were being used, and filled, we weren't as environmentally conscious as we are now. We didn't realise the effects of putting this stuff into the ground.

'So why are so many of our old pits close to waterways? They were seen as a way of reclaiming land, if you set them next to the water, on the edge of a harbour.'

In her book The Story of the Hauraki Gulf, EDS policy director Raewyn Peart describes how, from the 1930s, dumping of rubbish was encouraged around the estuaries and fringes of the gulf. It was a way of 'reclaiming tidal inlets and turning what were considered to be muddy wastelands into valuable waterfront land'.

By the early 1970s there were 14 tips on the edge of the gulf, she says. But the volume of Aucklanders' rubbish meant councils had to develop inland landfill sites.

'The old harbour-edge sites were all gradually closed and capped. Many were turned into parks. But pollutants still continue to leach from these old sites into the sea,' Peart says in her book.

Sage says New Zealand remains one of the highest producers of household waste in the developed world, per capita.

In the meantime, volunteers and others are out there cleaning the filth off the showcase beaches of South Westland.

How long will it be before another one of EDS chairman Taylor's 'time bombs' explodes?