Departing NZAS told it must live up to environmental responsibilities

Thursday, 9 July 2020

The former Mataura paper mill buildings, on right of the Mataura Falls, which house ouvea premix.

Tidy up behind yourselves – that’s the environmental message amid the lamentations the Tiwai smelter closure announcement.

“Bad enough a legacy of unemployed Southlanders that they’re going to leave behind, but we certainly don’t want a legacy of ongoing waste problems too,’’ Environmental Defence Society chief executive Gary Taylor said.

The society believes its upcoming court action seeking New Zealand Aluminium Smelters to be held accountable for the safe disposal of smelter dross is all the more important in light of the company’s signalled demise.

Once the smelter goes, the site must be returned to as natural as state as possible.

The society is also concerned about the standard of remediation – a requirement to leave the land on the Tiwai site itself in a condition as close as practicable to how it had been before the smelter was built.

NZAS has estimated it will take $250 million to meet these obligations. Taylor said the testing work and negotiations would need to be robust and well-scrutinised given the potential differences between the original “theoretical’ consent conditions and ‘’another look at it in the cold light of day in 2021’’.

More urgently, the society is seeking an Environment Court ruling to hold the company accountable for the safe disposal of smelter dross turned into an ouvea premix byproduct and deposited at sites in Mataura, Invercargill and Awarua.

The most notorious and problematic site is the 10,000 tonnes at the former Mataura paper mill next to the occasionally-flooding Mataura river. The premix releases ammonia gas when wet and the town was evacuated in February when floodwaters threatened the store.

NZAS denies ownership of the premix, having entered into a contract with a processing company, Taha Asia Pacific that later went belly-up, its liquidators disowning the remaining material.

Gore District Council chief executive Steve Parry said nothing in the closure announcement would affect the commitments made in a funding deed and to which NZAS was a signatory.

NZAS pledged $1.75 million, but there was still a $2 million shortfall estimated for the total removal from all five storage sites in Southland.

There were 22,000 tonnes in those premises and pledged funds sufficient to remove 14,000 of that.

The Mataura site wouldn’t be cleaned out, under the current contract, until Christmas 2022, Parry said.

There were also sufficient pledges to remove about 30 percent of what would be left in other premises.

Parry had been talking on and off with other parties about the remaining funding gap and said he had some ideas about where further funds could potentially be sourced, if necessary.

The Gore council this week agreed to be a party to the legal case being spearheaded by EDS: “Our role is really to be a servant of the process’’.

Taylor said he also expected, from earlier discussions, that Environment Southland would also be joining proceedings, and that there was also, in effect, an invitation for the Ministry for the Environment to be a party.

“Probably our proceedings are now more important because the company’s pulling out,’’ he said.

This needed to happen not just before NZAS departed these shores, but “before the next flood’’.