Editorial: Rubbish dumping bad look

Rubbish dumped along State Highway 5, coming into Rotorua.

Nothing ruins a scenic drive, walk or bike ride more than seeing piles of rubbish dumped on the side of the road, down a bank or in our streams.

It makes me mad - irate, actually. I find it so hard to understand how people can go to all the effort of driving to a remote area just to dump their junk when the landfill is not far away and the cost is minimal.

Unfortunately illegal rubbish dumping is a very real issue around Rotorua and is a major threat to the "clean, green and beautiful" image our country loves to boast.

In today's paper we have spoken to Tony Blatchford who drives along State Highway 5 every day to get to work in the city. Instead of enjoying the uninterrupted beauty of rolling hills, dense forests and plunging gullies, Mr Blatchford is confronted with decaying lounge suites, broken whiteware and electronics left so long weeds have grown around them.

But it's not just him seeing this mess, it's tourists from every corner of the world who come to New Zealand with a specific picture in their heads of the country being "nature's utopia", instead seeing hordes of these unofficial junk yards.

Then you get into the city. From the road the scenery seems fine and dandy, but all it takes is a look over a bridge or a gander up Mt Ngongotaha and you are confronted with the same ugly scene.

Rotorua Lakes Council acknowledges illegal rubbish dumping is a problem that creates a negative impression. But it has not made any prosecutions in the last 12 months because doing so is uneconomic.

I wonder though how uneconomic it will become if tourists start telling all their friends that Rotorua - and New Zealand - is not clean green and beautiful at all.

It would be shameful to see New Zealand lose its utopian reputation and become a nation full of people who couldn't care less what becomes of our landscape.

To stop this from happening we cannot just rely on the council or government agencies. We all need to step up and say we won't stand for it anymore.

With a united front we can restore what we had and once again proudly call our country clean, green and beautiful.