Porirua City Council fined $1000 for Spicer Landfill odour, braces for another

Thursday, 22 June 2023

The Porirua City Council has been fined $1000 after dozens of complaints about the smell from Spicer Landfill earlier this month.

It’s the council’s second fine in a year for the smell from the tip and it is expecting to receive another penalty for another spike of complaints on Monday.

Tawa locals made 50 complaints on Saturday, June 10, about the smell to Greater Wellington Regional Council, which monitors odour levels near the landfill. The latest fine relates to those complaints but the council expects it will also be fined for another 35 odour complaints on June 19.

But nearby resident Rachel Allan thought the fine was a “mockery” and the only way to fix the decade-long odour problem was to close the landfill.

“[The fine] doesn’t mean much, it’s just a piece of what we’ve gone through for the last 10 years,” she said. “[Porirua City Council] can’t mitigate it, they can’t fix it. There are other alternatives … they can ship the waste elsewhere to other landfills. I don’t think it necessarily is all about money, it’s also about the community and people’s lives.”

The city council said the caps of four gas wells – out of more than 100 that collect gasses from decomposing rubbish buried under the landfill – popped open because a valve was turned off.

“The fixing used on the cap was not secure enough and as the pressure built up the cap popped off,” said David Down, the council’s water and waste manager.

“At the same time the light north-west winds were conducive to dispersing the gas in the Tawa neighbourhood.”

Down said while the smell was “extremely unpleasant”, the hydrogen sulphide levels recorded at air monitoring systems in Tawa did not reach harmful levels.

“It’s disappointing to see this spike when we have actively been trying to manage and minimise odour issues at the landfill. Typically, this month we’ve seen more like 3-13 complaints a day, mostly in the evenings or early morning citing a ‘rubbish’ type of odour.'

The council was also fined $1000 last July after similar odour complaints. It had promised at a community liaison group meeting last November it won’t apply for a resource consent for the landfill’s life beyond 2030 until was resolved.

It had already taken measures including installing “odour cannons” to spray the air above the tipping surface with an odour neutraliser and spraying deodorant chemicals to bring the stench under control.