The toxic paper mill sludge that consumed a lake

Māori owners were robbed of their ancestral land and lake to create a toxic dump for a paper mill. Now the Norwegian owners are selling up - so who will clean it up? Andrea Vance investigates.

‘‘Once upon a time there was a lake, now there’s no lake.’’ Tomai Fox

Of the 20 or so sparkling lakes that make up Rotorua’s colourful geothermal landscape, one is now a shameful secret.

While it still appears on maps, Lake Rotoitipaku no longer exists.

Where once the shallow, rippling waters reflected sunlight, and teemed with fat tuna (eels), now lies a patch of dirt, overgrown with scrub, a shallow, stinking channel, and an old holding pool.

A sacred site, the burial grounds of 16th century warrior chief Tūwharetoa and his ancestors, the lake is now filled with over half a million cubic metres of contaminated industrial waste. For three decades, Rotoitipaku was the dump for the nearby Tasman paper and pulp mill.

Although it was Māori reservation land, the Crown took it in the early 1950s, deeming it wasteland. The lease on the lake and adjacent forest expired in 2013, and Māori trustees expected the land to be restored by Norwegian owner Norkse Skog.

But with the mill’s closure in 2021, the promise remains unfulfilled. ‘‘It’s like a fairy tale, eh?’’ says Tomai Fox, of the Kawerau A8D Māori Reservation Trust.

‘‘Once upon a time there was a lake, now there’s no lake.

‘‘Now they want to walk away and leave us with a big mess.’’

As a child, Fox would ride on horseback over mānuka-clad hills above Kawerau to fish for eels and trout in a tiny punt on the lake. They’d have to tread gently around the shore, prodding the ground with a stick, because it was ringed with bubbling ngawha (hot pools).

Sticky from the journey, his family would swim across cool waters to the centre of the lake, and then float over hot water welling from an underwater spring.

‘‘We’d call it The Bubble,’’ Fox says. In the evening, over a fire they’d cook fish, roast kūmara and singe wild pigs caught in the forest. ‘‘The food was plentiful.’’ Over 30 years, all of that was destroyed. From the outset, legislation gave the mill special dispensation to bypass already weak river pollution laws. After a decade of pouring solid waste into the Tarawera River, which lies 100m from the old foreshore and became known as ‘the black drain’, new restrictions were put in place. So, from 1971, it was piped into the lake. Rotoitipaku became the primary disposal site for solid waste, and it was transformed into a sludge pond, which crusted and hardened over time, subsuming the waters.

All of this was perfectly legal – and in 2009, Carter Holt Harvey (which operated the neighbouring kraft pulp mill now owned by Oji Fibre Solutions) and Norske Skog were given 25-year permits, which allowed them to continue to pollute the Tarawera River.

‘‘The mill’s always been here as long as I’ve been here, but before they started pumping rubbish into there it was a beautiful place and everything was pristine. There were birds, ducks, the waters were always full of fish,’’ says sixthgeneration landowner Wynyard Hunia.

‘‘It was a horrible thing. The poisons, the rubbish from the mill came in one end, and the fish were trying to escape out the other end.

‘‘They emptied the lake of all the life that was in it, and it was a heartbreaking time. But we understood that it would be restored one day. That’s what we thought.’’

These are the living memories of the trustees – all they have left are old black-and-white photos that show a long, narrow lake surrounded by bush, and geysers steaming white smoke. But the area is more than just a cherished childhood playground. Hundreds of years of cultural significance is bound up in the place they call Te Kete Poutama – which includes Rotoitipaku, the spring that feeds the lake Te Wai U o Tūwharetoa, and Waitahanui pā, on the shores of the lake.

The puna got its name – the lifegiving water of Tūwharetoa – when the infant was left in the care of his grandparents. When the child cried for nourishment, Waitaha Ariki Kore went to the upper reaches of the gully and struck a rock with his taiaha, producing tepid, clear spring water, soothing his grandson.

Generations of Ngāti Tūwharetoa ki Kawerau have gathered food, and soaked weary muscles at Te Kete Poutama, which was an important community hub.

Tūwharetoa was once buried with his ancestors at the urupā by the lake (his bones were later moved).

The hapū says their ancestors no longer lie in peace, the mauri of Te Kete Poutama is destroyed and their mana compromised. For generations, they have fought to return to their role as kaitiaki (guardians).

‘‘The reason why I fight? It is the significance of the lake, the significance of the history,’’ Fox says. His late parents Haki and Isabel struggled for years to stop the dumping, even blocking the mill’s trucks from crossing their land to reach the lake.

It didn’t work – the owners found a new route, building a bridge across the Tarawera – and the elder Fox was ostracised by the community, and frogmarched from his job. He continued to petition MPs and launched an unsuccessful claim in the Māori Land Court. Fox still has his notebooks.

A Waitangi Tribunal claim followed, which was later taken over by their son, and fellow trustee Colleen SkerrettWhite.

The tribunal awarded the trust $1m, which they are now using to pay for research on the contamination, and how to remove it.

Skerrett-White says she feels shame when Ngāti Tūwharetoa kaumatua visit the area. ‘‘The women were so shocked and sad when they got to see what had happened here that they were crying.

‘‘It’s embarrassing. You feel like they felt like we had let this happen.

‘‘But we haven’t, we’ve been trying to stop it. You know? We’ve tried lots of ways to stop it.’’

The trustees have a complicated relationship with the mill. It was one of the Eastern Bay of Plenty’s largest employers, providing jobs for impoverished Kawerau and surrounding towns.

Fox worked there for most of his life. Hunia for 40 years until 1999. ‘‘It’s sadness, not anger [I feel],’’ he Hunia.

‘‘Because truthfully, I had made a good living out of the mill, as did my sons and my grandchildren.

They believed their former employer would make good on promises to remediate the land, and were buoyed when a working group was set up to develop a closure plan. But little progress was made, and with the mill up for sale trustees fear the multinational will be allowed to walk away, with rate and taxpayers picking up the bill.

‘‘I think it would take an act of God to change it back to what it was,’’ Hunia says.

‘‘But it’s what was promised in the beginning. That it would be restored to just about what it was, or it could be used commercially, for planting trees or reserve.’’

Norske Skog said it couldn’t answer Stuff’s details questions before publication.

However, a spokesman noted: ‘‘Use of the area in question was done legally, in accordance with an environmental licence. The company has always worked closely with EPA [the The Environmental Protection Authority, the national-level environmental regulator] NZ and has not walked away from its responsibilities.’’

The spokesman added that the company took its environmental responsibility very seriously.

They worked closely with the regional council and other stakeholders and were currently ‘‘engaged in processes to agree the conditions for exiting the lease and for finalising the Landfill Closure Plan’’. They said a future sale of the mill would not affect the closure plan.

It’s not hard to understand the trustee’s disillusionment. The area is almost completely neglected, and any backstops to prevent further pollution appear to be failing.

Hazard signs are rotting and faded, a channel dug to allow fish to move from the creek to the river is sluggish and choked with algae, and a water pump switched off. Water has pooled in behind an embankment constructed some years ago to stop sludge sliding onto an adjacent property.

Given the name Te Whariki Toetoe, the pond is suffering ecologically and with heavy rainfall threatens to engulf Te Wai U o Tūwharetoa.

Groundwater in the area is also substantially contaminated with dangerous chemicals, including some cancer-causing toxins. Some – boron and arsenic – were already naturally occurring in the buried geothermal springs.

But dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), and drums of zinc hydrosulphite and sodium dichromate are buried in the lake bed. Testing has detected manganese, ammoniacal nitrogen, boron, arsenic, zinc, and chloride which exceeded maximum concentration limits for drinking water. Hunia is most worried about seismic activity.

One environmental report, written in 2004, noted that Lake Rotoitipaku is ‘‘one of the worst locations one could contrive for a waste disposal site.’’ A breach would poison the river, and send pollutants out into the Bay of Plenty, he says.

‘‘There’s always earthquakes here. It’s tremors all the time.

‘‘What I fear is that the trustees will be left holding the bag, and down the track a catastrophe will happen and the stuff will leak into the river and then the taxpayer will have to fork out for something that a corporate did.’’

The Bay of Plenty Regional Council is the regulator, and remarkably, the resource consents require no specific obligations to remove the hazardous waste. A spokeswoman for the council said the matter was complicated, and it could not answer Stuff’s questions before publication.

Skerrett-White says she’s disappointed in the council, which she says has failed to carry out monitoring at the site.

‘‘The Resource Management Act allowed for us to create iwi management plans, resource management plans, which we’ve done. But they just ignore them,’’ she says. New legislation, proposed to replace the RMA, contains polluter-pays clauses, which will force companies to deal with contaminated land. But the law won’t apply retrospectively.

The trustees have now sought legal advice. They want remediation – but don’t want to see the toxic waste dumped on someone else’s doorstep. Fox hopes for an environmental bond that will contribute to the costs of clean-up. Skerrett-White appeals directly to Norske Skog, one of the world’s largest producers of newsprint and magazine paper, which received a conservation award from Helen Clark’s government in 2001 for restoring wetlands.

‘‘You knew what you were taking on. You utilised the consent. You knew that you had a responsibility to remediate it, but you just packed up and left.

‘‘So, fix it. It was your responsibility, not ours.’’