Healing Papatūānuku

Chris Anderson, 30th May, 2025

An exciting and rewarding project for Croesus is the Bioremediation of dioxin contaminated sediment from the Kopeopeo Canal.

This is a project Chris Anderson has been involved with since its inception in 2009 and you can read more about the Kopeopeo Canal on the Papatūānuku page.

Dredging was completed in 2019 and together with Dr. Joanne Kelly, and a team from the Bay of Plenty Regional Council and from Ngāti Awa, we inoculated the sediment with fungus and bacteria and planted the contaminant site with different varieties of poplar and willow trees.

In March of this year, Jo and I went back to check on progress, and the results were amazing. It feels like nature really is healing the harm. The video shows the extent of tree development. There are insects, birds….. life.

And what is under the soil is even more impressive. The sediment going into the bags was yuck. Black, anoxic, sulphur smelling material that you could not call soil. But today, it is very different. The sediment is drying out and oxidising. This is being driven by gravity dewatering, but the trees are clearly doing their part. Trees pump large amounts of water out of the ground, and over summer this evapotranspiration will be turning the yuck into soil.

The sediment is no longer black; it’s a deep red colour, the colour of iron. Life is returning. We found roots throughout the sediment, and in one place we cored into an ant nest.

This is remediation in action. Kopeopeo canal used to be one of New Zealand’s most contaminated sites. Today nature is restoring balance to Papatūānuku.

If you want to know more about the Kopeopeo Canal bioremediation project and about our bioremediation system in general, get in touch.