New Zealand’s four-decade fight over waste incineration

Saturday, 12 July 2025

Te Awamutu residents are holding their breath.

They’ve fought their case against a proposed Paewira waste-to-energy plant in their backyard, standing shoulder to shoulder in their opposition with Fonterra and their local district and regional councils.

By the end of August, the Independent Board of Inquiry ordered by Environment Minister Penny Simmonds will decide whether the plan can go ahead.

It’s the latest in a series of local battles throughout the country against multiple attempts to launch waste incinerators, which environmentalists say are a dirty and expensive way to produce power, adding very little to supply.

They also see them as legitimising the continued production of vast amounts of waste, hindering efforts for New Zealand to transition to a more circular, sustainable economy.

Those trying to found them, including the scrap metal businessman behind Paewira, say such plants could divert waste from landfill, are a better way of dealing with municipal waste, and take care of the rubbish left over when metals have been reclaimed from the vast quantities of scrap cars and whiteware.

It’s a war that’s been raging between environmentalists, local community and business interests since the 1990s.

The dirty 1990s

The 1990s saw rising concerns globally over the pollutants created by incinerating waste.

Protests in New Zealand centred on the small North Waikato town of Meremere where the Olivine company wanted to convert a moth-balled power plant into a rubbish (and coal) burning plant to generate electricity. A second plant was proposed by Olivine for Gisborne.

Residents of Meremere, a town which was the first line of defence for Waikato Māori during the Crown invasion of the Waikato, had rallied against the proposal.

Their rearguard action has been repeated again and again in recent years as attempts to site waste-to energy plants near homes ‒ provoking a cycle of community action that Valerie Morse, from the Zero Waste Network, says repeatedly wastes energy that communities could be putting into other things.

The 2000s clean-up

In 2001, New Zealand signed on to the Stockholm Convention, part of an international effort to reduce the release of “persistent organic” pollutants including dioxins, which pose a serious threat to human health.

Morse, from the Zero Waste Network, which has been lobbying against waste-to-energy plants, says: “There was a growing recognition of the impacts of dioxins.

“New Zealand signed what was called the Stockholm Convention. The whole purpose of this was to get rid of the sources of the creation of dioxin, which is created by the process of incomplete combustion,” she says.

“It's a very long-lived substance. It's essentially what they call the persistent organic pollutants which bio-accumulate in human fat cells, and are carcinogens. So they're very well-documented sources of birth defects, human fertility issues, and all kinds of problems.”

Politicians acted in 2004 through the National Environmental Standard for Air Quality Regulation to effectively ban high-temperature incineration of hazardous waste, including open fires at landfills. Three facilities that had existing resource consents were allowed to remain, two of which had closed by 2011.

One of those was at Auckland International Airport, which burnt articles confiscated by Customs officers from inbound travellers and freight forwarders. It was closed in 2006.

“Greenpeace did some very effective campaigning to effectively get rid of the last waste incinerators in New Zealand,” Morse says.

By 2008, emissions from all sources of dioxins had reduced by almost 50%, according to the Ministry for the Environment.

However, the 2004 regulations did not apply to municipal waste-to-energy plants, though there was not a rush to build any of them.

“New Zealand wasn't even really looking at waste incineration because we had ample landfill,” Morse says.

Waste was not really on the radar, she says, and neither was building any waste incinerators.

“Nobody was talking about building any new ones.

“While landfills leech dioxin out into the environment, the dioxin in landfill is essentially the dioxin that's gone into landfill, it's not creating any dioxin, which is a different situation to incinerators.”

The 2010’s re-emergence

Around 2015, waste-to-energy was back in the national headlines.

When Holcim announced it was closing its Westport cement works, local company Renew Energy proposed converting it into a plant to burn West Coast waste to generate power.

It was controversial. Locals opposed it. They didn’t want to see Christchurch waste trucked over the Lewis Pass to Westport, just as Te Awamutu residents don’t want Auckland’s waste trucked down State Highway 1 to be incinerated in their backyard.

And, in 2018, the project hit a road bump when the Government withdrew a promised $350,000 grant after it emerged Renew Energy's then chief executive, Gerard Gallagher, was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

Gallagher resigned his position and sold his shares, and Renew Energy sought Chinese money to fund the plan. However, when local councillors found out they were being kept in the dark over details of the proposal, including a secret deal that would see the council supply a landfill for toxic fly ash produced by the plant, it was effectively dead in the water.

Waste-to-energy wasn’t entirely dead. In 2010, Fletcher Building-owned Golden Bay Cement started burning construction and demolition waste to displace coal at its factory in Northland.

Battles rage in the 2020s

Waimate residents organised to fight Project Kea, a plan to build a waste-to-energy plant in their backyard to burn Christchurch’s waste.

They were unconvinced by South Island Resource Recovery Limited’s claim that it was “best of the best” technology, instead dubbing it “yesterday’s technology”.

Rauwi Te Maiharoa, who owned land just a kilometre from where the $350 million plant was proposed to be built in the small town of Morven, was among the protesters.

The protest showed the community did not want the plant, he said: “The powers that be need to listen.”

They didn’t. In 2024, Project Kea was included in the controversial Fast-track system created by the coalition Government to speed up infrastructure development, and boost economic growth.

But the project, which was again backed by Chinese money, failed in 2025 when South Island Resource Recovery failed to secure the land it wanted to build on.

Last year also saw the end of a six-month trial of the Rainbow Mountain pyrolysis waste-to-energy plant at Waimangu in the Bay of Plenty, which failed its air emission testing.

That trial was referred to in evidence at the Independent Board of Inquiry into the Te Awamutu proposal, which was told only one of the three tests for dioxin was completed during the trial.

Morse says: “It has died a quiet death and I don’t think they would be successful in getting another resource consent.”

While the Te Awamutu plant remains in play, several other plants are being mooted.

Kaipara mayor Craig Jepson, who was involved with the Olivine company in the 1990s, supports a plan by South Island Resource Recovery to establish a $730m waste-to-energy plant in Northland to burn the region’s waste, as well as rubbish from Auckland.

Once again local residents rallied against having a waste-burning plant in their backyard to burn someone else’s rubbish.

Morse says a proposal for a slash and rubbish-incinerator badged as a waste-to-energy plant is also mooted for Gisborne by an Australian company called Bioplant Tairawhiti NZ. Bioplant’s website shows proposals for waste-to-energy plants in Fielding and Hokitika as well.

Jane Gama, a Te Awamutu resident who lives 400 metres from the proposed Paewira, is a veteran of 18 years in compliance and enforcement, including six years as a compliance officer at Hamilton City Council.

She captured local residents’ fears, and lack of trust in plant operators, in her presentation to the Independent Board of Inquiry.

“We are being told that this proposal is a solution to landfill. But we are not solving a problem. We are trading one problem and making it into a more dangerous, risky one,” she said.

“As someone who has worked inside a council, I know how stretched compliance teams already are. Waipā District Council has only a handful of compliance staff. I don’t believe they have the resources to effectively monitor a complex operation like this.”

Morse says environmentalists are not against all waste-to-energy projects.

In its submissions to the Independent Board of Inquiry, the Environmental Defence Society, and the Zero Waste Network, said: “It’s important to clarify that [we] are not opposed to waste-to-energy in principle. This is about this specific proposal. Waste-to-energy is a family of different technologies.

“There are waste-to-energy plants that work, like the Golden Bay cement kiln, because they offer a more sustainable and lower emissions alternative to the status quo. Were it not for the burning of tyres, that facility [Golden Bay] would need to burn coal, which would be worse for the climate.”

Golden Bay Cement started burning tyres from the Tyrewise product stewardship scheme in 2023, and has just announced it will start adding hard-to-recycle plastics to the waste it burns to make cement to further displace coal.

It’s helped the company reduce the carbon footprint of its cement.