“The decision to have three more days of resource consent hearings for Bioplant’s Feilding waste-to-energy proposal is shocking. All of the Council’s independent experts have urged the consent be declined, and the engineering basics of the project have been shown to be based on flawed data. The community will have to spend more time and resources opposing Bioplant’s toxic half-baked project despite expert agreement that it should not go ahead.” said Dorte Wray of the Zero Waste Network.

“The original public consent hearings were held in July 2022. The company was so poorly prepared for these hearings, and their application so inadequate that the Commissioners gave them pages of additional questions that were required to be answered. These were not minor issues, but fundamental questions about how the engineering of this plant is going to work and what materials are discharged into the environment. Much of this critical information has still not been supplied, and no cultural impact assessment has been conducted.”

“Under law, resource consent decisions should be conducted within 75 days unless the Commissioners decide otherwise. This clause is there for the benefit of corporations so they can get quick decisions, but there are no similar protections for the public to ensure that resource consent applications that have no merit are not allowed to progress. The reality is that this application should never have even been accepted for processing by the Horizons Regional Council; it was so lacking in basic detail. That it has gone on for more than a year shows that too much weight is being placed on granting consents even when they risk public health and environmental damage.”

“It is very difficult to understand why this company is allowed multiple opportunities to get a consent that is opposed by air, land, water and planning experts because it is not scientifically sound, and when it is opposed by the majority of the community including Māori.”

“Mana Whenua, Ngāti Kauwhata, have been staunchly opposed to the proposal and clearly outlined why it should not go ahead; the air pollution coupled with the land being subject to a Treaty claim are not things that should be ignored.”

“The Feilding community clearly wants real zero waste solutions that do not compromise their health and their environment. This resource consent hearing should be closed and the Commissioners should issue a decision declining the application immediately. Instead of being able to focus fully on building appropriate community-driven responses to waste and climate change, the Feilding community now has to put efforts into ensuring that this toxic nightmare is not built.”

Additional information:

• Resource Consent Commissioners issued a minute on Friday, March 10 indicating three further days of hearings would be held in July 2023 in Feilding.

• Read the Air, land, water and planning evidence from Horizons Regional Council experts

• Zero Waste Network’s supplementary expert evidence outlining the fundamental engineering issues and problems with company’s emissions data used for modelling

• See a timeline & background to the project on the Zero Waste Network site