News

Spicer Landfill infringement notice

Spicer Landfill: Response to questions on infringement notice (received from GWRC on 28 Sept 2022 in relation to complaints of offensive odour beyond the boundary on 7 July 2022)

Porirua City Council has been issued with a $1000 infringement notice from Greater Wellington Regional Council for unauthorised discharge of offensive and objectionable odour beyond the boundary of Spicer Landfill on the 7 July 2022. The fine has been paid.

The notice was issued in response to a complaint of excessive odour reported by a Tawa resident on 7 July and breaches of consent conditions. This complaint was investigated by GWRC whose job it is to regulate activity at the landfill.

We have been working hard all year to improve odour management following a pattern of increasing complaints since late last year. (Prior to this latest spike in complaints there have been relatively few complaints and issues for the past five or six years).

We know there is a high level of concern from the Tawa community (in particular from the western hills of Tawa and Linden). We’ve met with the community to discuss the issue and to understand the specific nature of the smells being emitted and where they are being experienced.

As far as we’re concerned it’s simply not good enough and we are doing everything we can to get to the bottom of it and make it better.

Odour management is a bit of an inexact science and requires a lot of trial and error. We are working on several different fronts to figure out what’s causing the problem and have put in place a raft of different measures to address the issues. We are monitoring the results of these trials to see if they make a difference.

We are currently working on placing a thicker intermediate cover (up to 500mm deep) on the non-active areas of the landfill which is hydroseeded as the cover is completed. This started in early August and is anticipated to be completed by the end of October 2022 subject to favourable weather conditions. We are hopeful that this will minimise the odour.

Other things we have implemented this year include:

• A fortnightly odour control task group that monitors odour mitigation measures and explore other potential solutions.
• Improvements to the active tip face filling plan.
• An alternative daily cover (ADC) is being sprayed on weekdays (weather dependent). A deodorant chemical is currently added to the ADC. Additional on-site odour surveys are carried out regularly to check the effectiveness of the ADC with the additional deodorant. We are currently trialling a combination of ADC and soil cover.
• We’re using a new odour neutralizer from the US that is sprayed directly onto the ground at new filling areas, and we’ve just started using an “odour cannon” that sprays the air above the tipping surface with an odour neutraliser. These are in addition to the odour spray lines near the perimeter that have been in use for some years already.
• Gas extraction system that is extended as waste filling progresses to actively extract and burn off gas from inside the active cell.
• Keeping the active filling area as small as possible and limiting how far waste has to be pushed to its final burial spot.
• Proactively letting Greater Wellington Regional Council and members of the public know, in advance, whenever there is a one-off/urgent case requiring the landfill to be open and operational beyond its normal operating hours.

We are also investigating installing another meteorological station on the ridge close to Meridian Road to get better information regarding wind direction and speed that could cause odour impacts to the community/neighbours.

19 Oct 2022