Tukituki Awa to be cleaned - hopefully

Tukituki River with Te Mata peak

Plans to protect and clean up the Tukituki river are good. Having a land based way of sorting out the human waste seems like a much better idea than dumping it into the river. Building wetlands is also excellent - after all they are nature's way of filtering and cleansing.

"Sewage could soon stop pouring into Hawke's Bay's badly polluted Tukituki River, with officials investigating a new system of disposing of the area's human waste.
Discharges of sewage from oxidation ponds in Waipukurau and Waipawa are seen as the biggest cause of the pollution that has sparked a cleanup campaign by the Hawke's Bay Environmental Water Group.
Now Central Hawke's Bay District Council is looking at a new sewerage system that would eliminate discharges into the popular river and could save ratepayers money."

""The Tukituki is very popular with swimmers, canoeists and fishermen, but it has become slimy and smelly at times in recent years.
"It would be fantastic if the council could achieve something positive before 2014."
Mr Crombie also welcomed a decision by Hawke's Bay Regional Council to start a five-year programme of building wetlands where some of the most important tributaries flow into the Tukituki. The programme, starting later this year, has not yet been costed.
The wetlands will remove or block much of the runoff from farms, especially cattle excrement."

It is our duty to clean up these rivers for our children and their children.