Mark Peart: Fonterra backs into dirty water

A good old-fashioned donnybrook between dairy giant Fonterra and the Otago Regional Council over wastewater discharges from the former's Stirling cheese factory in South Otago has underlined that being clean and green is just as much about reality as it is about perception.

Fonterra was on the back foot throughout last week as the Otago council highlighted, in detailed fashion, that the dairy co-operative's environmental compliance record, or as the council sees it, non-compliance, was less than spectacular.

The council's director of resource management, Selva Selvarajah, reported Fonterra's discharge of faecal bacteria into the Matau branch of the Clutha River near Balclutha was equivalent to treated dairy farm effluent from 6228 dairy farms, each with 200 cattle.

He said when that was compared with a typical sewage treatment plant system, it was equivalent to an average treated sewage discharge from a city of nearly 500,000 people.

Inorganic nitrogen levels were also extremely high at four times greater than from a treated sewage discharge.

Although Fonterra has a resource consent until 2011 to discharge up to 3000cu m of wastewater a day, Selvarajah has highlighted a history of microbiological contamination in those discharges, and excessive daily waste water volumes, dating back to 2000.

This includes the emergence in April 2004 of significant sewage fungus at a monitoring site more than a kilometre downstream of a wastewater outfall, and further fungal growth 2km beyond that.

The issue, which is complex and drawn out, will come to a head at a meeting between Fonterra and the council, due to be held any day.

It has become political, as these things do.

Clutha Economic Development Board chairman Don Harvey, in a spirited defence of Fonterra, said the council had "grossly exaggerated" the effects of the Fonterra Stirling discharge.

Harvey claimed the council was motivated by a "desire for revenge" after the Environment Court said Fonterra could be a party to an appeal by meat processor PPCS relating to supposedly similar issues at the PPCS Stirling, several kilometres away.

The council, for its part, thought it had a good line of "no surprises" communication going with Fonterra and felt it was ambushed by the company's sudden hitching of its wagon to the PPCS horses.

Harvey claimed reports painting Fonterra and South Otago in a "bad light" were full of "inaccuracies and exaggeration".

He said contrary to media reports that the discharge was sewage, it was in fact treated wastewater from the milk-processing operation.

"There is no sewage whatsoever in the discharge, with all sewage from the site being piped to the Stirling township system," he said.

But Selvarajah, who is well-respected in resource management circles, is adamant the research he and his staff have done suggest the Fonterra discharges are right up there as far as the magnitude of non-compliance in such cases internationally is concerned.

The council has a memorandum of understanding with Fonterra covering Stirling, which Fonterra wants to preserve, but which Selvarajah and his staff do not consider to be worth the paper it's written on.

The irony of the Stirling contretemps hasn't been lost on some.

Fonterra, and regional councils and Government ministers, signed an agreement in 2003 called the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord, under which Fonterra agreed to measure suppliers against a range of environmental and animal welfare standards, aimed particularly at cleaning up waterways adjacent to or on farms.

Local farmer-councillors are nervous about antagonising a major local employer and corporate giant, and probably wish the whole issue would just go away.

Unfortunately, it won't. Nor will many more like it up and down our supposedly clean, green land.

* Mark Peart is a Dunedin-based freelance writer.