Waitangi Mountain Bike Park project manager Tiffany Holland talks about the truckload of trash dumped from a scenic lookout onto a popular bike trail.
Ongoing rubbish dumping in Waitangi Forest is disheartening and disgusting — not to mention disrespectful to the whenua, angry locals say.
In the latest incident an entire truckload of trash has been tipped down a bank at a scenic lookout, with some of the waste tumbling on to a trail in the popular Waitangi Mountain Bike Park below.
Park project manager Tiffany Holland said dumping at Mt Bledisloe car park happened almost weekly, but not usually on this scale.
Tiffany Holland is angered and disheartened by ongoing dumping in Waitangi Mountain Bike Park. Photo / Peter de Graaf
She was riding with her family on Saturday when they found trash scattered across the trail.
''Then we looked up and saw this monstrosity sitting above us, just waiting to fall down on to the track. It's absolutely disheartening. We have a beautiful mountain bike park, this is one of the most beautiful viewpoints, but people who come here see piles of rubbish,'' Holland said.
''It's so disrespectful to the whenua. This is an extremely special and significant place. The fact it's treated like this is absolutely diabolical.''
This truckload of commercial and domestic rubbish has been dumped at a scenic lookout in the Bay of Islands, onto a trail in the popular Waitangi Mountain Bike Park. Photo / Peter de Graaf
The rubbish is a mix of domestic waste, rural supplies such as pig feed bags and electric fence tape, and what appears to the waste from a home renovation job including roofing iron, a bathroom sink, broken power drills and power leads.
Other items include an Xbox, furniture and an incinerator full of half-burnt plastic. It is thought to have been dumped on Friday night.
Holland said an even more revolting incident occurred in March when someone tipped a truckload of baked goods and rotten food down the bank.
The bags burst as they hit the trail below, leaving a 1.5m-high mound of rotting, maggot-infested food. Cleaning it up was disgusting, Holland said.
She ''absolutely'' wanted to see the latest offender fined.
There were similar problems along nearby Haruru Falls Rd where at least once a week someone bought two boxes of Ice beer and threw out all the empties, one every few metres.
The rubbish is a mix of domestic waste and what appears to be detritus from a home renovation project. Photo / Peter de Graaf
Haruru Falls man Bruce Gordon helped organise a volunteer clean-up of State Highway 11 between Paihia and Opua on Saturday, so he was outraged when he was told just hours later about the trash at Mt Bledisloe. He estimated the rubbish would have filled a 3-4 tonne truck.
He thought he had no chance of finding anything to identify the person responsible until he uncovered a bag of household waste with three separate items — an ACC letter, a building supplies docket and a roofing contract — all giving a name and address near Haruru Falls.
''They should be ordered to clean it up and if they don't, they should be made to pay the contractor's clean-up bill. I just can't understand it. How can anyone think it's okay to do this, especially in a pristine spot like this?''
It was ironic a truckload of trash had been dumped at a prime tourist spot in the very week Lonely Planet had named the Bay of Islands the third-best place to visit in the Asia-Pacific region, Gordon said.
Tiffany Holland is angered and disheartened by ongoing dumping in Waitangi Mountain Bike Park. Photo / Peter de Graaf
A spokesman said the Far North District Council took a zero tolerance approach to illegal dumping and would issue an infringement notice and fine if the culprit could be identified.
A contractor would pick up the rubbish and pass on any evidence of who might be responsible to the council's monitoring team.
While the identity of the man named on the dockets has been widely shared on social media, the Advocate will wait until someone is fined or charged before publishing a name.
