Conservation Comment: Chemical use seriously harming our environment

Although Ohakea Air Force Base discontinued use of PFAS in its fire fighting foam in 2002, contamination has occurred in groundwater sites. Photo / Bevan Conley

Opinion:
Chemicals finding their way into our environment can have indelible impacts, but a top-level report finds glaring gaps in New Zealand's chemical use oversight.

There is an adage: what we don't know can't harm us. But in the case of chemical compounds, our country's flying blind may mean finding out about harm too late.

The latest report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton, has found we have almost no idea what is happening with most chemicals in our environment.

Of the 30,000 chemicals approved for use across the country, few are subject to scrutiny for ecological risks. Only 200 are regularly tested for by regional councils.

The environment watchdog's report shines a light on our "disjointed and patchy system for asking, and answering, questions about the environmental fate and impact of chemicals" and challenges all agencies involved in chemicals to develop a common framework.

In agriculture, it's not as though we don't know what is being used. Amid global fears about insect population crashes and bee colony collapse, neonicotinoid insecticides, for example, have received considerable media attention. What we don't know, is how neonicotinoids are entering the environment and in what quantities.

Despite this group of insecticides being severely curbed in Canada and the EU due to seepage into soil and water systems, the commissioner's report has found that in New Zealand we survey groundwater only once in four years for pesticides, but not for neonicotinoids.

As for pesticides, we can hope that Whanganui doesn't have much to worry about. The Horizons Regional Council has detected pesticides in its four-yearly surveys of groundwater in recent years, but in most cases, concentrations have been less than the drinking water standards maximum accepted values.

Firefighting foams are another substance that can leach into water bodies.

In 2018, it was discovered that a chemical used in these foams — and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — had caused contamination in groundwater sites across New Zealand.

Widespread in use from the 1950s until 2006, PFAS were not monitored, despite risks to both human health and the environment being known. Eventually, there was a scramble to find out how much had been used and where.

Ohakea Air Force Base is one such place that faces PFAS contamination. Although use of the foam there ceased in 2002, it has formed a large plume of contaminated groundwater around the base and further towards the Rangitikei River.

Horizons Regional Council continues to work with the Defence Force to monitor the plume's movement — an illustration of how contaminants entering ecosystems can persist for many decades.

Overall, the commissioner's report is scathing of our holey environmental data and outdated, underfunded information.

Underlying the problem is a lack of authority and funding for enforcement agencies to act directly, a lack of clear authority for the Environmental Protection Authority to enforce the law, and a muted political response.

In 2019 the commissioner called on the minister for the environment to set up a pollutant register. New Zealand is alone among OECD countries in not having such a policy tool.

Recommendations for compliance, monitoring and enforcement were put forward in another lacerating report that same year. But nothing has happened so far.

A patchy, disjointed and not particularly sexy problem, chemical oversight is, in my opinion, taking a backseat to more crowd-pleasing research and innovation.

Ironically, "the kind of innovation the government wants to see from our environmental scientists is only possible if we understand the environment properly in the first place", says the commissioner.

Let's hope this latest demand for a radical shake-up changes the course.