Enforcement

 Pollution Prevention work proves its worth for Christchurch tannery

Pollution Hotline follow-up work recently showed its value when Environment Canterbury responded to an environmental incident at Lowe Corp, a tannery in the Belfast area of Christchurch. As a result of work carried out with the company late last year, damaging effects on the environment had almost completely been avoided. Last year, following a complaint to the Pollution Hotline, a number of problems were identified, which the company quickly corrected.

"When a part of the company's equipment failed recently, there was a significant build up of contaminated wastewater in the yard - the material could have flowed straight into the Kaputone Creek, near Belfast, “ said James Tricker, team leader, ECan’s Industrial Compliance Monitoring.

"We were very pleased that the company had earlier recognised that there had been deficiencies in their stormwater protection systems, followed our advice and installed a new stormwater detention tank. The new installation was designed to allow only uncontaminated stormwater to discharge to the stream. Contaminated stormwater was automatically pumped back into the company's wastewater system. A small quantity of wastewater was discharged to the creek as the detention tank had not been totally correctly installed by the company's contractors. This has since been rectified. However results of the sampling we carried out suggest that the effects on the creek are likely to be very limited," said Nathan Dougherty, industrial compliance monitoring officer.

"The work done by the company almost certainly prevented the discharge resulting in a prosecution in the Environment Court," said James.