Cough – as TDB was pointing out in July of last year, why trust Rio Tinto with pollution costs?
Tiwai Point smelter stockpiles 100,000 tonnes of hazardous waste near Bluff beach
The Tiwai Point aluminium smelter at Bluff has stockpiled more than 100,000 tonnes of cyanide-laced hazardous waste less than 100 metres from a fast-eroding Southland beach.
The smelter company will not reveal its plans for the hazardous waste, despite international industry guidelines it has signed up to that say it should.
The government said earlier this month it remained “completely blind” about what contamination the closure of the smelter at Tiwai Point might leave behind.
Let’s just get this completely straight.
Are we to expect a company that will shut down a smelter because of a $46m loss and who already has a deplorable reputation for lying and deceiving the clean up of toxins is actually going to spend quarter of a billion to clean up the entirety of Tiwai Point?
A clean up the Government barely has any direct answers over.
One of the real reasons we can’t shut down Tiwai Point is because the polluters have us over a toxic barrel. The second they walk out, they will leave this toxic legacy with us to deal with and they will laugh when we try to take them to court.
We need to seize some type of leverage here because they will leave us with this poisonous wound as soon as they need to.
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How about removing the power subsidy without telling them, and then foreclose when they refuse to/can’t pay their bills… It’s almost as good as nationalising the smelter, and should deliver a bonus of their current owners having a huge debt to pay, which could be leveraged on their other assets in NZ… The nats under john Keys direction wrote some pretty nasty little statutes, that gave these scum carte blanche over the rights of ordinary NZers.. Why not use the same approach to removing them? It’s not as if they have been very clever in hiding the fact that they are getting ready to do a runner on us… Let’s just give them a taste of their own poison before they get away clean..
Can recommend the “Dark Waters” movie to Daily Bloggers.
You’ll never look at teflon the same way again…..
Weird how business can just leave all their toxic waste to the taxpayers to clean up while small operators get prosecuted! Keep the precedent going of big business not cleaning up after themself (sarcasm) because the government lawyers only seem to get zealous when it comes to putting beneficiaries in jail, stopping minimum wages to carers or creating an alarming legal precedence of deporting Dotcom to a country he never lived or worked out of, after an illegal search for copywriter infringement which is not a criminal case in NZ…. hmmm
Thanks human rights abusers who don’t prosecute Pike River or CTV building and probably not bother with big business environmental rights abusers either. Hey what’s 100,000 tonnes of cyanide-laced hazardous waste less than 100 metres from a fast-eroding Southland beach mean – just a few hundred potential deaths, we can import more people in and have another government/lawyer led enquiry, not to worry.
I have no idea where to take old antifreeze from my car to be dealt with. I’ve tried transfer stations, work shops, looked on line and still none the wiser. The guys at the workshops just say tip it down the drain or use it as weedkiller. I’m reluctant to do that because I know it’s terribly toxic for the environment. It is not obvious to me who deals with old antifreeze in this country. So if I can’t get rid of a few litres of the stuff in an environmentally ethical way, how the hell do we expect any toxic waste to be dealt with in this country?
It makes me cringe knowing how many cars kiwis run and most will have some level of antifreeze in the cooling systems that sometimes gets flushed out and replaced if the owner is on to it with their maintenance but I know many aren’t or can’t afford it. This country I know is riddled with toxic waste dumpsites buried amongst the land and suburbs. 245T, tanolin, industrial chemicals, toxic metals, construction materials, car wrecks, old landfills sites leeching, plus many cockies with their hole of horrors up the back Paddock. Not to mention run off from roads, and all the other environmentally destructive industries such as forestry, horticulture, pesticides and round up usage.
Clean green 100% pure NZ they sell us to overseas. Jesus wept.
100% pure bullshit.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/124006095/northland-toxic-chemical-stockpile-cleanup-to-cost-3m-take-nine-months
https://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/300213642/revealed-the-companies-dumping-contaminants-down-the-drain
Ha!
‘Authorities stepped in when the clean-up was not done by the three companies involved – landowner Sustainable Solvents Group, and operators Sustainable Solvents and Solvent Services NZ.’
There you have it. If you have an unsustainable business that messes up ecology just brand it ‘sustainable or ‘eco’. Problem solved.
Order of priorities:
1. Chief Executives salary and bonuses.
2. Other executives salaries and bonuses.
3. Share price.
4. Shareholder returns.
5. Contributions to political parties.
6. Legal obligations.
7. Environmental concerns.
8. Obligations to employees.
If in doubt, liquidate the company quickly and transfer all financial assets to untracable accounts in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands etc.
Recommence operations in a different location under a different company name.
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