The owners of the Bonny Glen landfill may be told to take their toxic waste elsewhere if improvements aren't made by next year.
The Rangitikei District Council has given the landfill's operators, Midwest Disposals Ltd, until June next year to get the leachate up to an acceptable standard. Leachate is toxic runoff created by water filtering through the rubbish dump. It is currently collected at the landfill near Marton and trucked to the council's Marton wastewater treatment plant. But its high levels of toxicity has been a contributing factor to past compliance breaches at the treatment plant.
"It's got to be treated to a level that we accept and if it's not they know they have got to go elsewhere with it," council's utilities manager Joanna Saywell said.
"If they can bring it within the limits then it's effectively an acceptable wastewater discharge so they'd just pay for volume. If they can't meet those conditions then they would pay trade waste charges so long as it doesn't affect the plant."
Bonny Glen had been trialling various pre-treatments to remove ammonia, colour and oxygen demand from the leachate. It was having more difficulty removing the colour from the leachate than originally thought, Mrs Saywell said.