The government will put $464,000 towards finding out what is seeping out of a closed Whanganui rubbish dump and into the wetland and waterways beside it.
Minister for the Environment Nicola Grigg announced the money on Friday. It comes from the Contaminated Sites and Vulnerable Landfills Fund, and Whanganui District Council is adding $310,000 of its own, taking the total cost of the investigation to $774,000.
The former Balgownie landfill sits on the western side of Whanganui, between the suburbs of Castlecliff and Gonville and alongside the Kokohuia Wetland. It opened in 1956 and took the city’s rubbish until 1995, with parts of the site still being filled for another six years until 2001. It was capped that year. Whanganui’s waste now goes to the Bonny Glen landfill near Turakina.
“The allocation of $464,000 from the Contaminated Sites and Vulnerable Landfills Fund, combined with funding from the Whanganui District Council, will enable a comprehensive investigation and assessment of remedial actions of the former Balgownie Landfill,” Grigg said.
She said the age of the site was the problem. “Due to the age of the landfill, the site does not have several features associated with modern landfill containment and risk management.”
That is a polite way of saying the dump has almost none of the engineering a new landfill would be required to have. Landfills built under the rules that followed the Resource Management Act sit on sealed liners, with drains and pumps to collect the liquid that filters down through buried rubbish, and pipes to capture the gas the rubbish gives off as it rots. Balgownie predates all of it. Waste went into the ground and soil went over the top.
“This investigation will give us a complete picture of how any contamination and leachate from the site may be affecting surrounding waterways and wetlands, and what long-term options may be needed to protect the environment,” Grigg said.
Whanganui Mayor Andrew Tripe told RNZ the council had wanted this work done for some time and that nothing would be decided about the land until it was finished.
“This investigation is about getting the facts. Before we make decisions about the site’s future, we need to understand its condition and how it relates to the surrounding environment,” he said.
Tripe said the site was part of growing up in the city. “Like many people who grew up in Whanganui, I have memories of visiting Balgownie as a kid and hunting for treasure. Looking back, I realise how much our understanding of waste and its impacts has changed over the years.”
“While we can’t change how things were done in the past, we can do our best to manage the site responsibly into the future. These investigations will help us do that.”
People can still walk over the old landfill, he said, but what can be built on it is another matter. “You can walk on it and it’s accessible, but as far as what can be done on it is unknown. Obviously, there’ll be methane gas sitting underneath it, which is an accumulation over the time since it closed.”
“That’s very common with landfills or retired landfills. At the end of the day, it’s about, understanding what’s going on top of the ground, but more importantly, what’s going on underneath the ground.”
Tripe had earlier floated covering the closed dump with solar panels, an idea he dropped once he was told what was under his feet. “Apparently even digging beneath there could be seen as dangerous, and it’s kind of like potentially, you know, putting a pin in a balloon and it goes pop. So, we just don’t know what’s gonna happen, and that’s what the investigation is about.”
The wetland next door is already the subject of a long-running community restoration effort, the Kokohuia and Titoki wetland project. Ken Mair, who chairs the Mokoia Catchment RΕpΕ«, a group set up to look after the waterways of the wider catchment, said what happens at Balgownie matters well beyond its fenceline.
“The waterways and wetlands in this area flow through to Te Awa Tupua, so this work is an important step toward improving the health of the Awa and surrounding environment,” Mair said, using the name given to the Whanganui River in law. “Looking at future options for the landfill will support a broader programme of work focused on the well-being of whΔnau, whenua and the river.”
The council has been working towards this for a while. It advertised for contractors on the government tenders website in November last year, according to the Whanganui Chronicle, and field work was expected to begin early in 2026. The funded project started in June and is due to be finished by October 2027.
Balgownie is one of roughly 3,500 former landfill sites scattered around New Zealand, nearly all of them built before anyone thought to line the bottom or measure what came out. Most were quietly capped, grassed over and forgotten, and a good number of them were put where nobody wanted to build anything else, which usually meant beside a river, a swamp or the sea.
That siting is now the trouble. A national assessment of landfill exposure to climate change found 1,797 historic landfills face at least one of three hazards, being coastal inundation, closeness to the sea, or flooding. It found 176 of them exposed to all three.
New Zealand has already seen what that looks like. In March 2019 a storm tore into an old dump on the bank of the Fox River in Westland and spread its contents along about 100 kilometres of coastline. More than 850 volunteers, Defence Force staff and Department of Conservation workers picked up more than 13,000 bags of rubbish, and the clean-up was not signed off until 2022, at a cost of more than $3 million.
The fund paying for the Whanganui work is aimed squarely at that problem. It carries $20 million a year and is open to regional, district and city councils, usually covering half the cost of a project and up to three quarters where a council has a small ratepayer base. It will pay for detailed site investigations, for planning the remedy and for the physical clean-up, but councils have to fund the first look at a site themselves. Since 2024 it has allocated about $21 million across seven projects. It is now administered by the Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport, which absorbed the Ministry for the Environment on 1 July.
Balgownie is at the investigation stage, which is worth keeping in mind when reading the numbers. The $774,000 buys drilling, sampling and testing, and a report on what the options are. If the answer is that the cap needs rebuilding, or that leachate has to be intercepted before it reaches the wetland, that is a separate job with a separate and much larger bill, and one that would land largely on a district of about 50,000 people.
Do you live near an old landfill, and has anyone ever told you what is buried in it? Share what you know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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