Environment Southland increasing monitoring at Tiwai smelter site
Friday, 5 March 2021
Environment Southland is increasing testing and monitoring at Tiwai Point to determine what environmental remediation will be required when the smelter closes.
Regional council chief executive Rob Phillips has hired Aurecon, an engineering, design, and advisory company, to provide specialist technical expertise at the site.
”We have been asked by Minister for Environment David Parker to assist the Government to determine the extent of the remediation required at the site once NZAS closes.
“In response, we have developed a monitoring strategy for the NZAS smelter, which builds on our existing compliance monitoring programme,’’ he said.
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The Government has given Environment Southland $300,000 of funding to go towards engaging external expertise as part of its monitoring strategy, Phillips said.
“We will be in a position to comment further when we have more information at hand.”
The regional council monitors the conditions of NZAS’s consents, and as part of the strategy, the events monitoring and groundwater sampling will be more frequent, Phillips said.
NZAS holds eight consents: to discharge contaminants to land, discharge contaminants to air, take groundwater, discharge water which may include contaminants to a coastal marine area, discharge of treated sewerage to land, discharge wastewater to land, discharge effluent to coastal waters and occupy the coastal marine area with a pipe structure and with a wharf structure.
Phillips said some monitoring the regional council does now includes groundwater, discharges to air and discharges to water.
The amount of monitoring will increase because Parker wants to find out what the state of the groundwater or soil is under the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter site.
In February, he said his understanding of the situation [at Tiwai] was poor because the quality of information the Government had received to date had been poor.
Last week the Ministry for the Environment said it was unclear whether Rio Tinto is under any legal obligation to remediate the site of its smelter at Tiwai Point after it closes.
Ministry for the Environment chief executive and Secretary for the Environment Vicky Robertson told the Environment Select Committee that the legal liability for Rio Tinto to remediate the site once the smelter closed had been ‘’difficult to pin down”.
New Zealand Aluminium Smelters has set aside $298m as a provision in its accounts for the closure and rehabilitation of its Tiwai plant, and is conducting an extensive Closure Study to understand any environmental impacts on the Tiwai Point site and to ensure that the operation will be closed in a responsible manner.
In January, New Zealand Aluminium Smelter announced the site would stay open for four more years, after it announced in July last year it would close in August 2021.