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Please Support our Appeal to SAVE OUR WAI

$9,757 donated
Given by 171 generous donors in over a year

We are a dedicated volunteer group that have taken our plight to court, but we need YOUR help. Your donation will help us Save our Wai.

Bay of Plenty

With your support so far, we have been busy in court fighting for our right to appeal the consent applications by Cresswell (Nongfu Spring), who wish to create an industrial scale expansion of the Otakiri Springs water bottling plant in the Whakatane District.

We have now been successful in lodging the next stage in our fight and so urgently need to raise the funds necessary to achieve this. We have court costs, security and legal fees too pay, which we estimate to be in the region of $45,000 - $60,000. Our small team of volunteers need your help. All donations will 100% go towards paying our legal and court costs for this appeal.

Currently, Nongfu, a Chinese-owned multi-billion dollar water bottling company has successfully applied to the Bay of Plenty Regional Council (via its New Zealand owned subsidiary, Cresswell Enterprises) to take 1.1 million cubic metres of ancient groundwater from the pristine Otakiri aquifer.

Unless our appeal is successful, Nongfu will:

Replace an existing kiwifruit orchard with an industrial scale bottling plant

Dump 440,000 litres of treated wastewater per day into local waterways, which lead to the Tarawera river

Add an average of 202 truck movements per day from Otakiri (Whakatane) to the port of Tauranga via SH2 through Matata

Blow and fill 154,000 plastic bottles per hour, 24/7 every day of the year

Bay of Plenty Regional Council reports indicate the volume, source and recharge rates for this aquifer are not accurately known and some documents point to the aquifer already being over allocated before Nongfu received their consent.

We are a dedicated group of volunteers but we need help. Your donation will help us pay our lawyers and qualified experts to provide advice for our appeal.

Every dollar makes a difference and will help give us the experts we need to fight the multi-billion dollar giants and Save our Wai for future generations of Kiwis, instead of giving it away overseas.

Use of funds

We have successfully come through our first court battle and mediation and a date has now been set in May for our appeal. Your donation will allow us to continue our fight and employ the legal experts we require to help be successful in our appeal.

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Latest update

High Court Here We come!  19 December 2019

Hi all, we have had our decision come through as this article explains but I would like to clarify the last paragraph that our options are not limited to just refining conditions.

We also have a strong case to take to the High Court.

Sustainable Otakiri agrees wholeheartedly with the view that this expansion should have been publicly notified as this is an industrial scale expansion that will severely impact Tauranga city councils ability to plan for future rates and roading requirements.

By allowing a creep on existing resource consents to such an astronomical degree without public consultations would be devastating to our local traffic woes.

And could set a dangerous precedent for consent applications across the country.

Not only that, we have worked hard to raise awareness of the massive plastic production this business will cause and we are willing to keep up the good fight.

As such we call on the public to fund us, tell us if you will support our view that we need to appeal in the High Court.

Tell them your voice matters, support us and if we raise enough funds we will carry this all the way, as it stands our legal bills are already mounting.

If you're opposed to the public not being consulted on the actual long term affects and the massive increase in trucking this would allow (without consultation) into Tauranga- Please donate.

If you are opposed to 3.7million single use plastic bottles being produced in our region every single day (where they produced none before) - Please donate.

If you think that companies who apply to produce massive quantities of plastic should be required to take financial responsibility for the whole life of what they produce. - Please Donate.

See this extract from the following article.

"Environment commissioner David

Kernohan disagreed with the findings of

his colleagues and said he was of the

opinion that the water take application

and variation to land-use conditions

applied for should be declined.

''l recognise that mine is the minority

view,'' said Kernohan.

He said his concerns were not about the

water take but rather the adverse effects

on the environment of the end use of the

plastic bottles manufactured on-site and

that the resource application should have

been considered as industrial and

therefore be a non-complying activity

with wider public notification."

We will be setting up a Pledge me page to raise the first $35,000 we will require in the coming days or you can deposit here to help with our immediate mounting legal costs.

https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/funding-our-appeal-to-save-our-water

#nomoreplastic #notournz #notourfuture #water #environment #breakingnews #saveourwai

https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/118255435/appeals-against-chinese-water-bottling-plant-dismissed

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Latest donations

Isaac
Isaac on 19 Feb 2020
Thanks for fighting on our behalf. Water and the worlds aquifers will be the cause of wars for generations to come. We need to protect it and reference to the treaty is pertinent in this situation. NZ water is not a commodity to be sold to a multi national with no social or environmental conscience it blows my mind when the negative impacts on our country far outweigh any positives the oio think it may bring.
$100
Guest Donor
Guest Donor on 27 Jan 2020
Hope you win. Water is such a precious commodity. We have to keep that in our country for the future when its needed most. And I am totally against plastic bottles full stop! Keep going!
$500
Guest Donor
Guest Donor on 24 Jan 2020
Private
Tanya
Tanya on 24 Jan 2020
Private
Guest Donor
Guest Donor on 23 Jan 2020
$100

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This campaign started on 14 Jan 2019 and ended on 28 Mar 2020.