Dirty dairying: insult to injury

Last month, in a classic example of dirty dairying, dairy giant Fonterra was granted resource consent to dump 8,500 cubic meters of effluent per day into the Manawatu River. The effluent is primarily waste-water and washwater from milk processing, and will have the same effect as a town the size of Wanganui dumping all its raw sewage into the river. Today, they're trumpetting the fact that one of their plants in the Waikato won an environmental sustainability award - for an innovative process to treat wastewater. Talk about insult to injury...

Clearly, Fonterra has the ability to clean their waste-stream and reduce its effects on the environment. Equally clearly, they've decided not to do it at Longburn, and instead to just dump their waste completely untreated. This simply isn't good enough. If they can treat their waste and behave in an environmentally responsible manner in the Waikato, then surely they can do it here as well.