![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/1793652523_408_image.png\")
Darryl Jones from the Lauder Beautification Society, Otago Regional Council chief executive Richard Saunders and Federated farmers Otago president Anna Gillespie address a packed Becks Hall on Sunday. Photo: Jill Herron<\/p>\nOtago Regional Council will give no guarantees on the safety of drinking water supplies near where sewage byproduct is being dumped on farmland.<\/p>\n
Chief executive Richard Saunders says monitoring data is being continually assessed to determine whether there are any effects on surface or ground water, which might be due to the activity occurring on the site. \u201cWe are not able to give assurances on the status of individual water supplies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The council is now conducting a legal review of the consent issued for the sludge dumping in Central Otago, Saunders says. Nineteen complaints have now been recorded through the council\u2019s pollution hotline about the dumping of sewage byproduct sludge, which is trucked from the W\u0101naka wastewater facility to Lauder in Central Otago. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Queenstown Lakes District Council, which contracted the waste trucking firm SJ Allen to dump the waste, has so far declined a request from Central Otago District Council mayor Tamah Alley to halt the activity.<\/p>\n
Saunders says the review of the consent will be based both on information held when the decision was made, and that gleaned after consenting. It may or may not be publicly notified and the consent holder is permitted to continue operations while the work was done.<\/p>\n
It is unclear how long the review will take but the process is similar to a resource consent application, with the main review period set at 20 working days.<\/p>\n
Lauder Beautification Society member Darryl Jones says he and other residents welcome the review but will continue to strongly oppose the activity.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the face of clear community opposition, locals would be deeply enraged if Queenstown Lakes District Council refused to stop dumping waste at Lauder, particularly when serious questions remain about the scientific rigour applied to the original waste disposal consent.<\/p>\n
\u2018They\u2019ve given these people permission to dig trenches down to 1.2 metres and bury waste right in the water table. It\u2019s an appalling idea and it\u2019s asking for trouble.\u2019<\/p>\n
Darryl Jones, Lauder Beautification Society<\/p>\n
\u201cIt becomes a question of judgment, responsibility, and whether continuing is morally defensible in a community that has made its concerns clear. Legal permission is not the same thing as community acceptance, and it is certainly not the same thing as moral justification.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following a sometimes heated public meeting organised by Jones and other residents as week ago, Alley wrote to elected members at the neighbouring Queenstown Lakes council, asking that the sludge being taken to Lauder be diverted back to a disposal facility at Winton, in Southland.<\/p>\n
Queenstown mayor John Glover says the council\u2019s contract for the operation is being checked and further discussions will be held with the Central Otago council, although nothing else would change for now. \u201cThe last thing any of us want is to not be able to rely on a consent that\u2019s been issued.\u201d<\/p>\n
The original switch from Winton to Lauder in June was instigated by SJ Allen following the company\u2019s purchase of a 178 hectare sheep and beef farm, three kilometres from Lauder township.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Darryl Jones from the Lauder Beautification Society, Otago Regional Council chief executive Richard Saunders and Federated farmers Otago president Anna Gillespie address a packed Becks Hall on Sunday. Photo: Jill Herron<\/p>\n
The move roughly halved the 400km trip required when trucking from W\u0101naka to Winton and back, saving Queenstown Lakes ratepayers $1.25 million.<\/p>\n
Glover says he has spoken to Alley since receiving the letter and discussed the possibility of future disposal in Central Otago at a more suitable location, particularly as disposal within the Queenstown Lakes District is not being considered.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not something that we\u2019ve looked at in the past. And I think most people recognise we\u2019re quite constrained in terms of flat land and steep land is probably not suitable. Mayor Alley was saying there\u2019s probably lots of places that this activity could happen in Central Otago. They do have a lot of land, but this is, in her view, just not the right place.\u201d<\/p>\n
The letter that Alley posted to Facebook on Wednesday evening sparked a flurry of supportive comments. Asked how he felt about it being aired on social media, Glover said \u201cthat is her choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
In it, Alley expressed a keenness to work with the Queenstown Lakes councillors and others to find a \u201cdurable regional solution\u201d to waste disposal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also acknowledge that where the site, science and safeguards are appropriate, disposal of biosolids to land can be part of that solution,\u201d the letter said. \u201cOur concern is not with that principle. It is with this particular location, the process with which the consent was granted, and whether the present arrangements give enough confidence to the community that is being asked to live with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the meeting organised by the Lauder Beautification Society and Federated Farmers, angry residents grilled Saunders, the regional council boss, over the lack of a physical inspection of the dumping site prior to consenting.<\/p>\n
Saunders said all assessment work for the original consenting had been done correctly with staff relying on maps and data.<\/p>\n
Ken Taylor, a former director of science at Environment Canterbury who has owned property at Lauder for 16 years, gave meeting attendees an overview of what was likely to be present in the material being dumped.<\/p>\n
He said while its organic material and nutrients could be beneficial as a soil conditioner in the right application, there were also potentially disease-causing pathogens and heavy metals generally present. Emerging new contaminants in the world of waste dumping included endocrine disruptors, microplastics and a range of human-made synthetics (PFAS) that were so resistant to being broken down they were now known as \u201cforever chemicals\u201d.<\/p>\n
Darryl Jones told Newsroom he had viewed a water quality study released by the regional council in 2023 that noted the Lauder Creek catchment\u2019s soils were particularly prone to run-off. \u201cRun-off entrains soil, bacteria and nutrients which is transported to the nearest water course,\u201d the report stated.<\/p>\n
Jones says: \u201cAnything sitting on the surface is going to run off. And down between one and one-and-a-half metres, there\u2019s a water table with pristine gravels where the water flows easily. Nothing should be allowed to disturb that. They\u2019ve given these people permission to dig trenches down to 1.2 metres and bury waste right in the water table.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an appalling idea and it\u2019s asking for trouble. What makes it even harder to accept is that farmers around here have been held to account over water quality for years, yet this is somehow considered acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones says the seemingly basic level of investigation into the potential impacts is continuing to upset residents, some of whom now fear for the safety of their drinking and stock water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Otago Regional Council will give no guarantees on the safety of drinking water supplies near where sewage byproduct…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-649087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}