Kaikorai Stream: A tale of two tips

Otago Daily Times

21-05-2025

In the second part of a two-part series about the polluted Kaikorai Stream, Mary Williams investigates its journey past two tips and finds a leachate pond and angry residents.
Sandwiched between the polluted Kaikorai Stream and a sprawling, but largely unknown Dunedin tip there is a snake-shaped strip of land, 315m long and just 15m wide, the Dunedin council has categorised as an "esplanade".
Dictionaries describe an esplanade as a public place for promenading. The word conjures up images of Victorians holding parasols and a modern-day example, featured in council-funded tourism campaigns, is the St Clair seafront with its bracing air, ocean views, a salt-water pool and cafes.
The Burnside tip's esplanade has no path, there have been complaints about airborne dust and the murky stream sludges past. A "leachate pond" next to the esplanade is not for swimming — it stores liquid that has seeped out of the tip. The tip accepts contaminated waste.
There are no cafes and it is advisable to wash your hands before opening your flask, but not in the stream.
The leachate pond is permitted by the Otago Regional Council to overflow into the stream, up to three times a year.
The Kaikorai Stream has to fight its way past two tips — the privately owned Burnside tip and the Green Island tip owned by Dunedin City Council (DCC). Both take rubbish and contaminants and neither is closing any day soon to protect the stream.
The Burnside tip has taken rubbish for 35 years and is consented for another 13. The Green Island tip started dumping on Kaikorai estuary's tidal mud flats 71 years ago and has been reconsented for another 35.
There is hope the Green Island tip won't need a a 100th birthday party. However, the plan to open a new civic tip at Smooth Hill, 21km south, won't happen until 2029 "at the earliest", according to Dunedin City Council chief executive Sandy Graham, and is not universally welcomed.
University of Otago ecologist Gerry Closs says tips should never be near waterways. A tip in an estuary wetland is "always going to be problematic" and Smooth Hill has a river gully.
He says that, in Australia, laws are tighter. Deep, abandoned mines are used.
"I have always half-joked that Macraes gold mine would make a good tip."
The Resource Management Act defines esplanades as land for public access and recreation, or land that protects water bodies, but it's hard to perceive the Burnside esplanade as either.
Although there is no trail, the Outdoor Access Commission, Herenga ā Nuku Aotearoa, confirmed it is legal to walk the esplanade. Walking it in an upstream direction, it rapidly becomes a steep bank — strewn with rubble, broken metal and rubbish and with no native planting — that leads up to the edge of the tip's yard.
The yard is lined with the leachate pond, then rusty shipping containers, then old bits of machinery.
The DCC says it has a policy of requiring landowners who edge the stream, and who want to subdivide, to give up a 20m-wide esplanade reserve "for conservation purposes" as a condition of any subdivision consent.
It says it typically requires these reserves to be planted "as a buffer between adjacent land use and the stream".
A document unearthed from the DCC archives shows that, when the Burnside esplanade was acquired by the council in 2010, the subdividing landowner tried to barter down its width and the council agreed to 15m.
A report by council staff, written during the wrangle, said the stretch was "as important to the overall health of the stream and estuary as any other section" and a riparian strip was particularly important for biodiversity here "given the industrial nature of the surrounding land".
Burnside tip owner Mick Ross, of demolition and excavation company Nash and Ross, says it is "very frustrating" the council has not planted the esplanade.
The council says it has "no record" of making promises to plant and "no planting was required as part of the consent".
There is another unrealised council goal: its future development strategy contains an ambition to open a Kaikorai walking trail alongside the stream from the top of Kaikorai Valley to the sea, but also says it has no funding and no timeframe.
There are other, more tangible obstacles. The stream goes under roads and buildings and squeezes past multiple and unattractive industrial sites, which are not being subdivided.
Just downstream of the Burnside tip, one company has made an effort. Fireplace manufacturer Escea has planted natives and installed a pleasant outdoor seating area next to the stream.
It is an oasis but Escea chief executive Nigel Bamford is scratching his head about the council's plan to stitch together subdivided sections for a trail.
"It could take a thousand years."
His staff talk about their concerns for the stream. They sometimes see oil slicks and dead fish floating past . They are likely less aware of their neighbour's leachate pond and its permission to overflow goodness knows what.
Mr Ross doesn't respond to a question about the frequency of overflows.
The ORC says the pond overflowed into the stream during a rainstorm last October and the tip owners have complied with the condition of no more than three times a year.
There are easier ways to view the Burnside tip than a risky walk on its esplanade.
Residents of Scotland Tce, on the Green Island hillside to the south of the Southern Motorway, get a bird's-eye view across the road and the stream to the tip on the opposite flanks and how it has changed over time.
In 2016, the DCC granted permission for it to carry on over a bigger area, and in 2018, the ORC granted consent for the tip to take contaminants.
The leachate pond was designed to receive channelled stormwater running over the tip and leachate that seeps out of the tip and then discharge it into a DCC sewer. However, the tip's ORC "discharge permit" allows overflow into the stream in high-flow rain events, up to a maximum of three times a year.
The expansion came as a shock to Scotland Tce residents, who were not notified. One says their young son loves looking at the diggers, but others mention dust, smoke, noise, risk to the stream, complaints they had lodged and their stress levels. The complainants didn't want to be named.
"It's just ridiculous," one said.
"I think it is disrespectful to nature," said another.
"No wonder people's physical and mental health has taken a hit over the years."
She thinks companies that make things that then get dumped should be blamed — "out of sight, out of mind doesn't do it."
The residents have snapped photos of the tip showing dust, smoke and an array of objects including parts of buildings, sofas, a spa bath and even something that looks like a boat.
Mr Ross says the tip is built on top of impermeable stone. It is on the site of an abandoned marl (mudstone) quarry, which supplied a cement factory that operated here between 1922 and 1988.
Mr Ross doesn't mention a slope behind the Kaikorai Stream and the tip's truck yard, which residents say has risen up recently. Tip documents describe it as a buttress wall, built to retain waste dumped into the hillside behind it. Residents' photos show waste strewn across the wall, then buried into it.
The tip's consents require it to monitor and report how it is managing its risks and the ORC says it is auditing the tip, with results expected in June.
Mr Ross deflects attention elsewhere. He describes the Kaikorai Stream as "massively contaminated and has been for a long time ... I am pretty sure the leachate coming out of our landfill is cleaner than that stream".
He calls the council's tip, downstream at Green Island, a ticking timebomb with "high potential for leaching ... It will be a forever problem. They will never sort it out. The real problem is what went in there in the 1950s".
The Green Island tip contained 4.8 million tonnes of waste by 2020 and was reconsented last month for another 35 years. Concerns about leaching keep bubbling up, while the council claims it is managing containment.
The plan to shut the tip in four years is uncertain. It has just been reconsented by the ORC for another 35 years and the ORC's submission to the DCC draft long-term plan doesn't mention protecting water from risks posed by city tips.
Fish & Game environmental officer Nigel Paragreen says the future could be different if the tip shuts, but the stream's heavy pollution — from wherever — means there will have to be a "genuine effort" at restoration.
He gives an example from 2020, when liquid concrete, mixed by a council contractor, got into the stream and caused the death of five long-finned eels.
"People want to walk around, fish and hunt in the estuary but if it were a nicer place, interest would explode. People want spaces to connect with the environment and there are precious few close to urban centres."
One man, who lives about 10km north of the estuary, is already connected to his environment and the Kaikorai Stream. It springs from his land, high up in the Flagstaff hills.
It is fitting that Alan MacLeod is a source custodian. He has spent a lifetime connected to water, from stream to sea. When he was a child, his intrepid family took him on sailing trips between New Zealand and the United Kingdom and, as an adult, he captained boats for conservation missions to remote islands.
In the 1980s, he couldn't afford fence posts to protect the stream from stock, but that didn't stop him. He cut down ageing gum trees and split them with steel wedges. Today, one man's efforts mean the bush remains, he can drink the water and there are birds.
He adds his voice to the calls for an end to the pollution downstream.
"The water up here is soft, drinkable and I have looked after it all my life. But what happens to it lower down, goodness knows ... In this day and age it is just not good enough."
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