Brian Rudman: Sewage ruling puts landfill up creek

One of my first assignments, on passing my driving test, was to head off to the Mangere sewage treatment plant to load up sacks of free "biosolids" for the family vegetable gardens. Boy, how it made the tomatoes and rhubarb flourish. In the early days of the treatment plant, we home gardeners happily completed the waste disposal cycle. But not any more.

Over the next 35 years, Watercare Services will have 4.4 million cubic metres of the stuff to get rid of - and thanks to a decision of Auckland Regional Council planning commissioners, nowhere, long-term, to put it.

The publicly owned body had come up with what I thought was a brilliant solution to their problem. Truck, or pipe it in slurry form, from the nearby treatment plant, to the huge underground rock quarry sites on adjacent Puketutu Island in the Manukau Harbour. Over time, the holes would be filled and possibly even shaped into humps to simulate the volcanic landscape which had been hacked away since the mid-1950s to provide metal for the adjacent airport and later, general city road works.

Watercare had reached an agreement with the island's owners, the Kelliher Charitable Trust, to pay a $25 million lease over the course of the 25 to 35 year rehabilitation process. Once finished, the island would be handed to the citizens of Auckland gratis, to become a new regional park.

But the deal was conditional on the commissioners giving their approval for the disposal/rehabilitation project. Last month they gave it the thumbs down. The result is, unless Watercare is successful in its planned appeal, the $25 million windfall for the Kelliher Trust is dead, as is the new regional park. Also, Watercare has to go back to the drawing board for somewhere else to dispose of Auckland's reprocessed biowaste. The only winner is the Maori spirit world.

The commissioners' main reason for turning the application down was "because inserting waste, including human body waste, into the body of the island would be deeply repugnant and confront [Waikato Maori's] core beliefs". For the people of Waikato, "the indivisibility of land, water and other natural elements from the deities who created them [are] a core aspect of their religious and spiritual wellbeing (and consequently, of their daily lives). Once the biosolids are deposited on and into the island, the effect on the beliefs, and equally on the mana of the tribe and its constituents, would then be permanent and irreversible". This would give "great and lasting offence" and was therefore against several sections of the Resource Management Act.

Given that, by the time the bio-solid material reached the island, it would have been treated and transmogrified into something other than human body waste, it's hard to see what the fuss is about. Having, in the past, questioned the place of quaint, out-of-date, Christian religious mumbo jumbo in the daily lives of 21st century New Zealand, I find this bowing to long discarded snippets of the Maori spirit world equally hard to comprehend.

Even the commissioners accepted that given "appropriate management procedures" any public health effects can be controlled. Surely that's the issue that should be of most concern.

The commissioners were also critical of the final landform that Watercare's project would produce. It's hard to believe that the partly remediated pits that the present quarrying will leave will look any better.

The irony is, the complainants, some of whom live near the treatment plant, now face the prospect of heavy trucks shipping 300 tonnes of waste a day - and if the plant expands, more - through the local streets to a landfill site elsewhere.

Where? Well I do remember, just over a year ago, Auckland University's dean of science, Professor Dick Bellamy, proposing that the cluster of cones that once nestled alongside the remaining Big King at Three Kings, be recreated. Living nearby, in a street that looks out over what was Auckland's largest explosion crater, he mused that "we've destroyed a number of the originals, here's a chance to do something a bit nicer". As at Puketutu, mining at Three Kings will soon end.

Could this be the site Watercare may need? Certainly, with a man of science in support, religion might be persuaded to keep its distance.