Who knows what green waste is?

Like his father Neville before him, Sandhills Road (Ahipara) farmer Dion Masters is happy to provide a spot just inside his roadside gate where people can dump their green waste, without charge. Problem is, some people have difficulty telling the difference between green waste and the likes of polystyrene, bikes and wheelbarrows.

All sorts of inorganic waste kept turning up, he said yesterday, and he had had enough.

He had tried putting up signs, to no effect, and the plan now was to erect and lock a gate, with a key obtainable from the transfer station just along the road. Anyone who was carting anything not green wouldn't be getting in.

"We're happy to give people this facility, for nothing, even though there's a cost for us," Mr Masters said.

"Some people just chuck their stuff on the ground rather than adding it to the heap, so we have to come down with a tractor and move it, but worse is the inorganic stuff that's left here. We have to get rid of it, at our expense, and we're not putting up with it any more."

Green waste would from time to time be burned, when conditions were right and he could get a permit, or someone might be invited to put it through a chipper and turn it into mulch, but he was tired of disposing of other people's inorganic rubbish in his own time and at his own expense, particularly when they had to drive past the transfer station to get to his farm.

"I caught one person, who really should have known better, about to dump a trailer load of computers," he said, while sorting through household rubbish on another occasion had led him to an address in Kaitaia.

"It took them three gos to pick it all up and take it away, but they did it," he added.

"I go by the 90/10 rule. Ninety per cent of people use it properly, and then there's the rest.

"If it was plant no more than two months ago it's probably green waste. If it wasn't it's not, and I don't want it here."