No records kept of leachate in water

20 Dec 2014

This article published in the Wanganui Chronicle, 20 December reveals a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with Midwest Disposal regarding disposal of leachate into the Marton WWT Plant. These levels we’ve been told in earlier reports are regularly exceeding acceptable levels and the Plant cannot handle them. The RDC’s record keeping on the levels disposed of has been so lax, according to this latest article, that the true environmental impact has been ‘hard to calculate’.

This ‘gentleman’s agreement’ is somewhat disconcerting and something is not right here. We have:

• an unsigned contract that is clearly benefiting only one of the two parties and to the detriment of the other
• as a result of this ‘agreement’ the health of the local stream being compromised
• one of the parties (trusted with the health of the public waterways) showing itself negligent in its duty to maintain clear records about the levels of disposal …. dating back to 2006?

The community needs to connect some dots here & demand to know why this negligence regarding the health of our local environment. Why is the water being compromised?  Something is not right here … seven years of missing data, a gentleman’s agreement and now a consent application to carry on greatly increased operations for 35 more years. If that consent is granted then it needs to be with some strict adherences regarding disposal of its leachate and Council maintaining meticulous and transparent records.

An additional note, a recent report in the RangitikeiLine Bulletin (cited in the Feilding Herald, page 7, & dated August 14, 2014) regarding the volume of trucks bringing rubbish in to the landfill has concluded ‘the trucks are unlikely to become more numerous on a daily basis’ if the resource consent for an extended landfill is approved. The question needs also to be asked then, how can this add up when it is proposed the landfill’s capacity will quadruple? How can there be a continuation of the same volume of trucking with quadruple volume of rubbish?

Local feedback suggests there is a far greater volume of truck traffic than is being cited. One observer has counted a conservative estimate of 35+ in a morning, an average of one every 10 minutes. They are loud, often smelly, often dropping refuse and often speeding it’s been reported.

It is the same with the cited frequency of the leachate trucks. It’s said in the article cited above that a leachate truck dumps leachate once every second day, whereas an observer on the truck’s route presumably (in comments at the end of the article) has observed a leachate truck passing up to three times a day.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE