Long-standing waste issues compounded by a huge fire are having intolerable effects on the residents of a Christchurch suburb. LIZ MCDONALD reports.

Katinka Visser used to enjoy sitting in her sunny conservatory. She used to enjoy friends coming over, and was able to dry her laundry in the fresh air.

But the cocktail of pungent smells and dust in her Bromley neighbourhood leaves a bad taste in her mouth, literally, irritating her throat and eyes. She says she can taste the stink when she speaks, and it keeps her awake at night.

The stench in the conservatory is too bad for her to sit there. Friends no longer want to visit. She has to run the dryer because outside drying makes her clothes reek. Her mobility issues mean she spends a lot of time at home, and cannot drive away to fresh air in another part of town.

With the city’s sewage plant, composting plant, and one of its landfill collection sites in the neighbourhood, Bromley is putting up with the rest of Christchurch’s waste.

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Visser and other residents in and around the suburb talk of being exhausted by the fight to clear the air around their homes.

This week, two of these council-owned facilities were on the agenda at a city council meeting. The residents who turned up to speak sounded variously desperate, angry, and tearful as they spoke of black dust, stomach-churning smells, and ill health caused by poor air quality.

On one of these facilities, the Metro Place composting plant, the council’s hand has been forced.

After repeated breaches of the plant’s resource consent conditions, the council has been given deadlines by environmental regulator Environment Canterbury (ECan) to fix the problem.

The council-owned facility is run by private contractor Living Earth, a company that is part of Waste Management NZ Ltd and ultimately owned by the China-based Beijing Capital Group.

Faced with either having to fix or shift the plant, the council has now opted for the latter after tender prices to redevelop it onsite exceeded the $21 million budgeted.

But the shift could take up to six years, and the council is considering closing the plant altogether in the meantime. A report due back from staff next month will outline the costs and implications – including environmental and neighbourhood ones– of an immediate shut-down.

A kilometre and a half away, the state of the wastewater plant is a more recent, but more acute problem. Burned by a massive fire six months ago, its twin trickling filters are full of rotting organic matter that stinks after rain falls into them. A staff report this week revealed clearing the troublesome contents would fix the problem, but this will take an about-to-be appointed contractor several months.

Staff say ongoing emissions of potentially explosive gases means covering the filters to try and reduce the stench could be dangerous. The 55m-diameter by 8m-high volume in each filter, and the presence of melted roofing material mixed in with the organic material, means any chemicals sprayed over top could become airborne and would not soak in and be effective.

In short, no quick fix has become apparent.

The flow-on problem of the under-treated sewage sloshing into the oxidation ponds is causing a less severe, but more frequent stink. This is being addressed by installing new aerators, council staff say.

In the right wind, the odour from the filter tanks is spread across much of the city. On still nights, it settles in concentrated form in the immediate neighbourhood.

In deciding what to do with its two problematic waste facilities, the council has been awkwardly juggling multiple responsibilities and statutory requirements, relating to pollution, climate change, rates, consenting requirements, and health and safety.

ECan can issue notices and fines for breaches of resource consent cognations, if it can monitor and detect them – effectively ratepayers fining ratepayers.

Councillors at Thursday’s city council meeting acknowledged their stench-producing facilities in a city with a prevailing easterly wind were continuing to cause distress to residents while they search for solutions.

They asked staff to investigate if help could be made available in the meantime. This could include some financial relief for increased power bills or another type of compensation, councillors suggested.

Following this week’s meeting, Catharina van Herwaarden remains sceptical about promised improvements, and is angry it will take months to remove the rotting matter from the burnt filter tanks.

Van Herwaarden moved into a “lovely two-storey home” in Bromley after the earthquakes. But she was near the composting plant and the smell worsened over the years, she says. After constant complaints from herself and other residents, changes at the composting plan improved the smell, but there were always bad days.

“It was making me sick. People said ‘why don’t you move?’ My doctor said ‘why don’t you move?’ After 10 years, I couldn’t stand it any more.”

Late last year van Herwaarden managed find a buyer for her home, and moved east to New Brighton. She is enjoying the relief of having fresh air to breath.

She is now shocked when she visits friends in her old neighbourhood to find what they are living with, especially since the fire.

“It’s really, really bad for the people there, after the fire. Not everyone can get out, if they want to.

“I think the city council just expects people to live like this. It’s not acceptable for them to say ‘we will try our best’.

“There’s a lot of talk – it is now that something needs to be done. They need to do something for the people to compensate. It’s shocking.”

ECan councillor Nicole Marshall says that despite the association of Bromley with bad smells, people were living in the suburb long before the city council set up its industrial waste management activities there.

Addressing the council in a private capacity this week, Marshall said the concentration of waste facilities in the neighbourhood was affecting the economic, physical and mental wellbeing of residents.

Marshall said the council was “poisoning” residents and should not be “spending ratepayers money to make people sick”. She acknowledged ECan's response had been inadequate.

Locals fighting for clean air in Bromley in 2022 follow a long history of residents protesting the downwind effects of the council’s waste strategies.

The wastewater plant dates back to the 1950s and 1960s and followed the creation of oxidation ponds next to the Avon-Heathcote Estuary. The plant has been built up to become the council’s most valuable asset in financial terms.

Years of trouble with smelly oxidation ponds, and the algae-boosting effects of pumping extra nutrients into the estuary, have been progressively tackled with new technologies and structural additions.

At the time of the November fire, the plant was functioning very effectively without problems, the council’s head of three waters and waste, Helen Beaumont, told councillors this week.

The insurance claim on the burnt filters has been accepted but not settled. The council must consult with its insurer as it continues the remedial work, councillors have been told.

The composting plant is a much more recent addition to the suburb. It opened in March, 2009, as a way to turn the problem of compostable waste into a saleable product that was an alternative to fertiliser.

At that time, about half the city’s rubbish collection – in those days collected in black plastic rubbish bags – was estimated to be compostable garden or kitchen waste.

The new plant was intended to reduce the methane emissions created when organic waste is tipped into landfill, and to prevent long trips to Kate Valley Landfill in North Canterbury.

The green waste was to be processed in enclosed tunnels into “pathogen-free and biologically stable compost”, which would then be “transferred to outdoor windrows to mature”.

Almost immediately, odour problems were reported. The council reassured the public in late 2009 that there were financial remedies in the contract with Living Earth if it did not meet performance targets, including a requirement to operate within its resource consent.

Complaints in Bromley continued, and in 2020 ongoing reports from residents of a stench likened to rotting fish, dead animals and the smell of a newly-opened bin were tracked by ECan to the composting plant.

That prompted the council to stop Living Earth processing animal carcases and offcuts being brought in from fish and poultry processors, what authorities call “pre-consumer” food waste.

Subsequent changes such as adding probiotics have brought improvements, but they have not been enough to stop the consent breaches.

Michael Williams, one of the residents who fronted up to the city council this week, is celebrating the promise that the composting plant will be moved but says Bromley residents are treated as second-class citizens.

For his neighbours who spent over a decade fighting for clean air, the battle sucked up their spare time, and dictated what they could do with their lives, he says.

He describes the handling of ongoing breaches at the organics plant as “a benchmark case in regulatory failure”.

The wastewater and composting plants belong to the city, not to Bromley, and their long-standing association with the suburb has led to discrimination and indifference, Williams says.

“Continued action is required now.”

Williams says the residents should have what others in the city take for granted: “The right to breath air not contaminated by this pollution plague.”