Pharmaceutical firm to pay for water treatment

After failing to filter its fatty discharge properly before pouring it into Manawatu River, New Zealand Pharmaceuticals has instead decided to pay Palmerston North City Council to do it.

The company is waiting for legal sign-off so it can send its wastewater into the city's sewage treatment plant.

The Linton manufacturer had spent $2 million trying to upgrade its own treatment plant to meet stricter environmental standards, but with an October deadline from Horizons Regional Council looming, NZP decided to send its discharge to the city council to treat among the city's and other industries' waste.

It will pay the city council at least $35,000 a year to treat its discharge.

The council has also previously said some pre-treatment by NZP could be necessary.

The deal will come with benefits for the pharmaceutical company – it will be able to discharge more waste into the river if it needs to, and will be able to discharge more chromium metal than it was previously allowed.

NZP discharges 240 cubic metres of process water into the Manawatu River each day.

The bore water it uses as cooling water may contain low concentrations of chromium, so the company is allowed to discharge up to 0.007 grams of the heavy metal per cubic metre of cooling water.

But the company's own recent testing showed chromium was escaping into the river through the company's process water as well. That means it is putting more chromium in the river than it is allowed to.

In April, the company asked Horizons Regional Council to let it discharge 6 grams of chromium from its process water each day as well.

It also asked to have until October to get its treatment plant upgraded as it was struggling to treat the waste to a suitable level.

City council water and waste services manager Chris Pepper said the city's system had enough room for NZP's waste so if the company did end up discharging more than 240 cubic metres of process water each day, it would not be a big problem.

The chromium that NZP will add to the city's system would mostly get captured in the system's sludge and not end up in the river, but the council would be keeping a close eye on metal levels in the river, Mr Pepper said.

The council won't make a profit from taking on NZP's waste. The charge will just cover the cost of treatment, he said.

The strength of the waste NZP will put into the system is high so the cost could go up, Mr Pepper said.

The city's sewage treatment plant costs $7 million to run each year.

The annual charge to companies wanting to put their waste through the system comes to about $491,000, ratepayers pay $5 million and the rest of the cost comes from revenue from carbon credits.

NZP managing director Richard Garland said the city council would be better able to treat the wastewater than the company could, with less risk of heavily-polluted water getting into the river's already struggling ecosystem.

City councillor Chris Teo-Sherrell had originally voted against allowing NZP to put its waste into the city's system but now believed it was the best option for the Manawatu River.

The city's system could treat the waste to a better level than NZP could and there would be one less pipe going into the river, he said.

"Ideally, if all waste that goes into the river had to come through the city council's system then it could control the standard it was treated to and look at moving it to a land-based option, which I think should have happened long ago," Dr Teo-Sherrell said.

The council would probably be saving NZP a lot of money by taking on board its waste, so it should pay the city more for that, he said.

- © Fairfax NZ News