Hundreds march against river pollution
Oct 14, 2006 6:58 PM

Hundreds of people marched through Palmerston North on Saturday to protest what they say is council-endorsed pollution of the Manawatu River.

They claim the regional council has approved more than 190 permits to discharge waste into the water and that is destroying the river.

Marchers say their local councils have let them down.

"It's getting very scary. It's actually becoming a public health risk," says protest organiser Malcom Mulholland.

Some experts agree.

Massey University ecologist Mike Joy says everything the university measures in the river at the lower end shows it is severely polluted.

"So it's sort of off the bottom of the scale - it can't get any worse," he says.

The protesters say the last straw was when Horizons Regional Council gave a Fonterra dairy factory the go-ahead to discharge thousands of cubic metres of effluent a day into the river, for the next 15 years.

"I think its disgusting that Fonterra are allowed to dump something like 280 milk tankers a day of effluent into the river," says Mulholland.

Joy says if the authorities realised how bad the pollution is they would not stand for it.

Horizons officials refused to speak at the public rally. But they say they are considering organising a special public meeting over river water concerns.

The Palmerston North City Council is also being targeted. It pipes treated sewage into the river from 14 separate sites.

Marchers said they would like to see somebody clean the river, and don't want to be
swimming in effluent.

Fonterra also declined to comment.

But the protesters say big industry, like Fonterra, should be helping to pay for the clean up. Some estimates put the cost of a clean river at hundreds of millions of dollars.