Environmental regulation report cards released

Greater Wellington has published its environmental regulation annual report cards, highlighting the council's regulatory and pollution prevention work in the 2007/08 financial year.

The cards cover five areas: resource consents, compliance monitoring, incident response, enforcement and pollution prevention.

During the 2007/08 year Greater Wellington's consents team processed 703 consent applications, 99% of them within statutory time frames. Applications for land and water use comprised three quarters of all applications (55% and 21% respectively) processed.

Greater Wellington's compliance team monitored 1352 resource consents; 75% were fully complying, another 11% partially or mainly complying and 14% non-complying, up one percent on the 2006/07 year.

However, nearly 30% of discharge permits were non-compliant with conditions relating to environmental effects. These included discharges to land from agricultural effluent and on-site human wastewater systems, discharges to air from industrial sites and discharges to water from large bulk earthworks sites.

This has prompted additional inspections of some discharge permits to be undertaken in the current 2008/09 financial year and ongoing work with consent holders to improve compliance performance, including the Muddy Waters pollution prevention programme and annual dairy farm inspections.

Both the range of enforcement tools and their frequency of use have continued to increase since 1999. In the 2007/08 year, Greater Wellington issued 85 warning letters (113% increase from 2006/07), 60 advisory notices, 83 abatement notices (186% increase), 49 infringements (20% increase), two enforcement orders and four prosecutions.

Greater Wellington's Environmental Protection team was also busy, responding to 1182 environmental incidents ranging from waste oil and diesel spills to unconsented earthworks, up 7% from 2006/07. Objectionable odour generated the largest number of incidents (29%) followed by liquid waste (17%), sediment (9%), and smoke and dust (9%).

The Environmental Protection team also runs Greater Wellington's pollution prevention programme Take Charge which assists businesses to achieve compliance with Greater Wellington's regional plans and improve on site environmental management. Thirty-five businesses took part in Take Charge audits in the 2007/08 year, with 11 completing the audit process.

To download the report cards visit www.gw.govt.nz/reportcards.