Building a waste-to-energy plant near a dairy factory ‘lunacy’, hearing told
Thursday, 26 June 2025
Environmental protection agencies and Fonterra have found themselves on the same side at hearings into an application to build a “nationally significant” waste-to-energy plant in Te Awamutu.
An Independent Board of Inquiry into the proposal to build the Paewira waste-to-energy plant in Te Awamutu was told on Wednesday that it was “lunacy” to build a waste incinerator next door to a Fonterra dairy factory.
That followed Fonterra outlining its opposition on Tuesday, when it told the hearing that pollutants, including airborne particulates emitted by the incinerator, would threaten its Te Awamutu factory’s ability to produce export-quality dairy, potentially threatening 350 local jobs.
“The project is incompatible with the existing food production activities in the surrounding environment, which have been in place for over 140 years,” said lawyer Daniel Minhinnick, representing Fonterra at the hearing on Tuesday.
Minister for the Environment Penny Simmonds ordered the inquiry last year to probe the application from Global Contracting Solutions, which is majority-owned by scrap metal businessman Craig Tuhoro.
The facility near to the Fonterra factory, homes, two childcare centres and the Waipa Racecourse, would generate power by burning a mix of municipal waste, end-of-life tyres, building waste, and “flock” from an Auckland scrap metal yard run by a company also majority owned by Tuhoro. Flock is a term used for a form of hazardous waste generally composed of metals, fibres, foam, rubber, plastics, glass and dirt.
However, the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) and Zero Waste Network told the inquiry that the proposed plant would not burn hot enough to handle the hazardous material.
The two agencies said harmful pollutants like dioxins would be released into the environment from its 60m high chimneys, and potentially as a result of dealing with tens of tonnes of ash generated every day. They presented evidence claiming the emission of tiny airborne particles in an area which already had elevated levels would result in an increase in premature deaths.
Their legal counsel Dihlum Nightingale told the hearing there were multiple gaps in the evidence presented by the applicant.
English waste-to-energy plant expert Dr Andrew Rollinson, who gave evidence by video-link, told the hearing that the proposed plant would operating as a hazardous waste incinerator using non-hazardous waste incineration technology.
The applicant said it planned to sort materials to remove hazardous waste, but Rollinson said the application did not say how that would be done and he doubted it was possible.
“I don’t understand how he’s going to make hazardous waste into non-hazardous waste,” Rollinson said.
“You are talking about mixed materials, shredded up and mixed together. Plastics, for example, contains thousands and thousands of additives [including] flame retardants,” he said.
Rollinson said the design and use of Paewira would be diverging from established incineration best practice that had evolved over a hundred years.
The applicant expected to burn 175,289 tonnes of material a year including 17,529 of flock, 35,058 tonnes of tyres, 78,880 of municipal waste and 35,058 tonnes of plastics.
Rollinson gave evidence of pollution around waste incineration and waste-to-energy facilities at overseas.
Returning to Paewira, Rollinson, an expert witness for EDS and Zero Waste Network, but not Fonterra, said: “It’s lunacy to build it next to a dairy facility”.
Feelings are running high among residents around the site, who oppose the site, along with Waipā mayor Susan O’Regan.
The two environmental groups also sought to persuade the board of inquiry that the proposed plant would not produce as much electricity as the proposal suggested, and it would produce far more greenhouse gas emission than sending it to landfill did.
The hearing has heard arguments about whether Paewira should be best characterised as a waste-to-energy plant, or a waste incineration plant.
Opponents say in Europe it would be classed as a waste incinerator, and Te Awamutu locals have taken to calling it a “toxic incinerator”, while the applicant says it is designed to extract both materials and energy from waste, so it is not incineration.
At the Wednesday hearing, independent expert witness Hannah Blumhardt said there was a correlation between easy waste disposal and the amount of waste that was generated.
Allowing the plant to be set up would hinder waste minimisation efforts, making it easier and cheaper for waste-producers to dispose of their waste, reducing the incentive to stop producing it.
Earlier in the hearings, King’s Counsel Bronwyn Carruthers, lawyer for the applicant, pushed back on that idea, saying there was no evidence Paewira would disincentivise a reduction in waste generation.
“Any consequential effect of disincentivising a reduction in waste generation is either too remote or minor,” she said.
Establish facilities that pushed down the cost of waste, and made it easier to get rid of waste, diverted attention and capital from efforts to reduce waste, Blumhardt said.
The hearings are taking place in the same week Fletcher Building revealed a plan to start burning hard-to-recycle plastics to generate power to make cement at its Golden Bay cement factory.