A Christchurch businessman has been ordered to pay more than nearly $150,000 in fines and costs for illegally dumping electroplating chemicals in North Canterbury.

Stephen Graham Knight, a company director, pleaded guilty in Christchurch District Court to charges of discharging the chemicals onto land which may have entered water.

Environment Canterbury said it was told that several 200-litre drums of washed down copper sulphate and hydrogen peroxide had been left on a property near Parnassus, North Canterbury, in September 2008. (Read on …)

MILLIONS of litres of radioactive water from the Ranger uranium mine have flowed into internationally acclaimed and World Heritage-listed wetlands in Kakadu National Park.

Traditional owners say they will oppose plans for a huge expansion of the 30-year-old mine by Energy Resources of Australia, unless the company upgrades outdated environmental protection procedures.

The Rio Tinto-owned ERA has tried to play down an alarming and unexplained spike in contamination in water flowing from the mine into Kakadu’s Magela Creek between April 9 and 11, The Age can reveal. (Read on …)

Schemes to clean up waterways and improve water quality have received a $93.5 million boost.

However, critics say there is still not enough money going into improving the environment.

Environment Minister Nick Smith said the money would be spent in the next five years, and was a significant increase on the $16.5m which went into the area between 2004 and 2008.

The central North Island would be targeted, with initiatives around Lake Taupo and the Rotorua Lakes. (Read on …)

A confidential submission released accidentally by the federal government shows the owners of the heavy-polluting Hazelwood brown coal power plant will resist energy efficiency efforts because they could hit their bottom line.

International Power’s submission to a taskforce developing an energy efficiency policy also states that energy efficiency is only about power use, not energy production.

”International Power rejects any proposal to introduce climate change policy under the guise of energy efficiency measures, which has the potential to destroy the value of existing investments in the generator sector,” the submission says.

International Power’s assets include Victorian brown coal power plants Hazelwood and Loy Yang B, both among the highest carbon-emitting plants in the developed world. (Read on …)

Most people do not want mining on land protected by Schedule Four even when the economic benefits are laid out in front of them.

That is according to a poll of 2215 New Zealanders carried out for the Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Stewart Island was the place people were most opposed to seeing mined (60 per cent against), followed by the Coromandel Peninsula Forest Park and Te Ahumata Plateau on Great Barrier Island (55 per cent each). (Read on …)

Hastings District Council has been illegally dumping stormwater into streams and drains for 10 years.

This is despite Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s demands that it reapply for expired resource consents.

Meanwhile, illegal dumping of toxic waste flushed down stormwater systems has killed eels, sometimes by the hundred.

It had taken the threat of legal action to get the district council focused, regional council compliance leader Bryce Lawrence said yesterday. (Read on …)