How can the public access the information from the Landfill about water monitoring levels?

What are you monitoring for?

We do specific tests at the Southern Landfill as part of the conditions of our consent for operating the Landfill.

The water tests are taken at points within the Careys Gully stream adjacent to the Southern Landfill itself.

1. Careys Gully stream upstream of the Landfill

2. Careys Gully stream downstream of the Landfill

3. Four boreholes that access the ground water in various locations adjacent to the Landfill.

4. Leachate collected by our pipes (tested at a manhole)

We do the following tests on ALL the sites monthly.

On top of this we also conduct Macro Invertebrate Sampling to get a Macroinvertebrate Community Index (MCI) score.

Test are collected by a third party and sent to a laboratory for testing to ensure independence.

Reports are sent to the Southern Landfill and a third party peer reviewer monthly.

If we find issues that could be considered to be a breach of our consent, we alert Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) as well as our Community Liaison Group (CLG). The CLG is made up of representatives from the Greater Regional Wellington Council, Wellington Water, the sludge dewatering plant operators, the Landfill operators, the Greater Brooklyn Residents Association, Owhiro Bay Residents Association and Council’s Waste Operations officers.

At the end of each year, the water quality sampling results are compiled and reviewed by a third party reviewer and sent to the Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) as part of our annual Southern Landfill Compliance report.

GWRC then reviews the information using their own third party experts required and once satisfied provide us with a compliance document.

2018 Extract Southern Landfill Compliance Report.pdf

2019 SLF Aecom Testing for Annual Compliance Report.pdf

Our next set of drop-in sessions will be held in March. Come along and see the draft design, check out information on the technical studies and find out about the next steps.

Here’s a recap of where we’re at

• Alternatives have been investigated and the option for the immediate future has been determined – extending the Landfill.
• Technical studies to assist with the design are being finalised.
• A draft concept design for the extension is being developed.

Want to know more?

Come along to one of our drop-in sessions:

Tell us what you think

We’d love to hear your views at one of our drop-in sessions. If you can’t make it along we’ll be posting information on this page (after 8 March) and you can tell us what you think on the feedback button below, or email us at Landfill@wcc.govt.nz or call us on 04 499 4444.

More than 100,000 tonnes of waste comes to the Southern Landfill every year so what happens to it all?

From that almost 20,000 tonnes is diverted, salvaged or recycled every year.

• Green waste diverted to compost – approximately 5,800 tonnes per year

• Food waste diverted to compost – approximately 1,600 tonnes per year

• Scrap metal diversion – approximately 575 tonnes per year

• Salvaged material and voluntary drop offs at the Tip Shop – estimated at 250 tonnes per year

• Recycling from kerbside and the free recycling drop off – approximately 11,500 tonnes per year.

The remaining material is either too dangerous to be diverted, e.g. asbestos contaminated material, or there is currently no large scale and economically sustainable facilities that can divert this waste so it needs to be landfilled.

That said, we are always on the lookout for opportunities for diversion.

We helped start Kai to Compost, a bespoke private food waste collection service geared to service café’s, restaurants and businesses in the Wellington area. We have seen it grow to the point it is now run by a private waste company with the resources to improve the service.

By May 2020, we expect to run a trial to divert household kitchen food waste. This trial will help inform us on the best methods of kitchen food waste diversion for Wellingtonians.

There are some things YOU can do now to help us divert the waste that comes to the Southern Landfill.

• Separate out your green waste – keep green waste separate from other waste. We can divert green waste to make compost at the Southern Landfill.

• Keep building waste separate – separated wood can be dropped off at the Tip Shop. We can resell this timber. Metals can be dropped off at our scrap metal bin for free.

• Stop by the Tip Shop before going to the transfer station or the tip face. We may be able to take some of your old furniture and sell it on to someone who needs it.

• Take some time to understand what can and can’t be recycled, separate these out and use the Council’s free kerbside recycling collection service.

• If you have large amounts of recyclable material, more than what can be taken as part of our kerbside recycling service, come to the Tip Shop at the Southern Landfill. We have bottle banks, paper/cardboard bins and plastic bins for you to drop off your recycling for free.

• If you have a good idea on how to divert even more waste and are willing to make it work as a business, apply for one of our waste minimisation seed funds. We have funded successful diversion businesses like Again and Again.

• If you hire businesses to do work on your behalf, e.g. a tradesman for a building project, ask them to separate any waste they produce to help with diversion and try to reuse material wherever possible.

For more about what can be recycled visit https://wellington.govt.nz/services/environment-and-waste/rubbish-and-recycling/top-tips-for-rubbish-and-recycling

For more about the Tip Shop visit https://www.facebook.com/TipShopWellington/ or https://www.trademe.co.nz

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Landfill team!

We'll be taking a short break over Christmas and New Year and will be back on deck in early January 2020.

If you have any questions, please email us on landfill@wcc.govt.nz and we'll be in touch when we are back on deck.

We really enjoyed talking with everyone who attended the second set of community information sessions we held recently. Thanks for coming along.

Key issues were similar to those at the first series of meetings with a couple of extra subjects coming up.

The top three topics were waste minimisation, the effects of the traffic including noise and dust as well as the volume of traffic, and the difficulty of understanding which council regulates what at the landfills in Wellington (Wellington City Council or Greater Wellington Regional Council).

Other issues of interest were recycling initiatives, dealing with sewage sludge in the future, impact on water both in the Ōwhiro Stream and groundwater and long term plans for reinstatement of the land and stream after the closure of this stage of the Landfill.

Residents of Hawkins Hill Road and others close to the Landfill boundaries wanted to know more about windblown litter and visual impacts of the extension to the Landfill for them. We will be looking at options to mitigate this.

One of the other topics raised was the potential for noise impacts due to operations especially early morning and in the weekends.

We’ve recorded all the feedback and questions we have received and are looking at the mitigations we can put in place to address the issues raised.

Our next series of community information sessions is planned for the end of February 2020 where we will feedback on the issues raised this time and look at the design of the proposed Landfill extension.

Over the last few days, we’ve completed a series of drop-in sessions in Brooklyn, Owhiro Bay and in Central Wellington. It was really great to meet everyone who came along to discuss the project with our project team from the Southern Landfill and Tonkin + Taylor.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come along and to those who took part in the Facebook Live Q&A.

Lots of information came out of the discussions which we are now collating. We’ll be going into these in more depth here on Let’s Talk over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, if you didn’t attend the Facebook Live Q&A you can review the questions and answers here https://www.facebook.com/events/529205860968116/.

We are really interested in your feedback and any information you may have about the technical studies that are now underway. Please take the time to visit our feedback form where you can let us know your thoughts. Feedback closes on Monday 23 December. Feedback in Let's Talk.

All the information we have received from the drop-in sessions and from Let’s Talk will be taken into account in the next stages of the project.

There are two more sets of community sessions planned before the resource consent is applied for. Tentative dates are the end of February and the end of April. We look forward to seeing you then!

Want to know how we landed on extending the Southern Landfill as the best option for managing the City’s waste, for now?

Interested in what technical studies we’ll be doing to guide the design of the extension?

Want to provide insights into the next steps?

Then come along to one of our drop-in sessions starting this Sunday, 1 December.

If you can’t make a session but would like more information, contact us by email Landfill@wcc.govt.nz or give us a call on (04) 499 4444.

We’re about to start our next round of community engagement on the proposed extension of the Southern Landfill.

The assessment of different types of waste management alternatives concluded that extending the Landfill remains the most viable solution for now.

To progress work, we need to do a variety of technical reports to help with the design of the extension and to support our resource consent application that will be lodged in 2020.

We’ll be holding public drop-in sessions at the start of December to explain how the decision was made and to seek input on the proposed technical studies.

Drop in sessions:

Sunday 1 December: 11am to 1pm, Brooklyn Community Centre, 18 Harrison Street, Brooklyn

Sunday 1 December: 2pm to 4pm, Owhiro Bay School Hall, 96 Happy Valley Road, Owhiro Bay

Tuesday 3 December: 11.30am to 1.30pm, Facebook Live Q&A, Wellington City Council Facebook page

Tuesday 3 December: 4.30pm to 6.30pm, Penthouse Cinema, 205 Ohiro Road, Brooklyn

Wednesday, 4 December: 11.30am to 1.30pm, Wellington City Council, Level 16, 113 The Terrace, Wellington Central

If you can't make a session but would like further information, contact us by email landfill@wcc.govt.nz or give us a call on (04) 499 4444.

When we put waste into a landfill, our microbial friends naturally start eating up the waste. As they consume the waste, they tend to produce methane as a by-product, similar to what happens in a cow’s stomach.

It is important to point out that this is a natural anaerobic process that occurs to anything organic we throw away, bury and allow to decompose, regardless of whether it is in a landfill or in your backyard.

Generally methane is contained within a landfill by the placement of a clay cap, a layer of clay that we place above the waste that contains the gasses within the landfill.

This ‘cap’ is not completely airtight and as the gas builds up under it, some of the landfill gasses escape into the air. This can cause unpleasant odours but more importantly, it also allows methane, a known greenhouse gas, to escape into the air.

Methane is about 100 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. At the Southern Landfill, we recognise this is not ideal for the environment and our neighbours.

The Wellington City Council and its partners, Nova Gas, have installed gas wells to ’suck ‘ the gas through pipes and burn it in a generator to produce electricity, much like a petrol generator. The generation process does produce carbon dioxide but this is much better for the environment than releasing methane.

We currently have around 16 operating gas wells around the various stages of the landfill powering a 1 Megawatt generator that sends the power into the national electricity grid to power up houses heating and electric cars/buses.

As a landfill gets older, it produces less and less methane as the bugs eat all the waste. Over a period of 50 years, we expect landfills to produce only small amounts of gas and to ‘stabilise’. Because of this, over time it may become uneconomic to continue to suck the gas to produce electricity at the Southern Landfill.

When this occurs, the land can be repurposed for other uses but not housing. Most sports playing fields in Wellington are built on old landfills. With the appropriate infrastructure and a bit of work, these old landfills can be used as recreational areas for everyone to enjoy.

Waste comes to us from various sources. For some waste there is no alternative because it’s too dangerous to handle, e.g. asbestos waste, and the Southern Landfill is the safest disposal site.

For other waste, like kitchen waste or construction waste, there are alternatives to landfilling but the challenge is for industry to set up affordable processing schemes and for us to support these initiatives when they become available.

Regionally, we currently send 600kg of rubbish per person to landfills every year. Some of this waste could potentially be diverted but either the disposer decides not to separate out the recyclable waste or there are no readily available diversion options.

The Landfill is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Once the rubbish gets here, we have to accept it and deal with it.

We can all do more to reduce our waste, but it takes a concerted effort and we may have to change the way we act and how we live.

A good starting point is to change the way we purchase our groceries. Only buy sufficient food for the week, shop to menus, purchase choices without excess or any packaging. This reduces food and packaging waste.

Other ideas include:

• If you have a garden, home composting of your food scraps.

• Separating out the recycling correctly – kerbside recycling is provided in Wellington City. This reduces material that could have been recycled going to Landfill.

• Drop off e-waste for free at the Southern Landfill.

• Re-use, refurbish or resell old furniture.

• Fix appliances rather than buying new ones. Check out the Tip Shop account on Trade Me, we sell a whole lot of spare parts for vacuum cleaners and computer parts.

To find out more about recycling in Wellington City go to https://wellington.govt.nz/services/environment-and-waste/rubbish-and-recycling/top-tips-for-rubbish-and-recycling

For more about the Tip Shop visit https://www.facebook.com/TipShopWellington/ or https://www.trademe.co.nz