Paul Robert Taylor
Paul Taylor is a director and the largest shareholder of Renew Energy, accounting for 19.6% of the overall shareholding. Taylor is also a South Island Resource Recovery Limited(SIRRL) director. Taylor has been the spokesperson for SIRRL in all media releases to date.
Mr Taylor describes himself as an arable farmer, farming 221 hectares of farmland in Ashton, south of Ashburton. In a Frank Films release called ‘Does New Zealand need a Waste-to-Energy plant?‘ Mr Taylor described himself as a “custodian of the land”. He stated that he first came across the Waste-to-Energy concept in Europe some thirty years ago when travelling on his overseas experience (OE) and thought, “why aren’t we doing this in New Zealand?” Comments like these only reinforce how outdated this concept is, at a time when we should be embracing technologies that move us away from the need for waste disposal methods like incineration and towards designing waste out of our lives.
Although Mr Taylor likes to state that he genuinely believes that W-t-E is the way forward and a better solution to landfilling our waste, it is hard to justify that waste incineration and subsequent ash landfilling are any better. Adding the destruction of vast amounts of precious resources in the process, like 2.5 million litres of fresh water daily, while releasing it into the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas, would show that W-t-E is worse. There is a good reason why European countries and governments are moving away from W-t-E incineration. Just like New Zealand, EU countries are committed to global obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. W-t-E is hindering countries from meeting those obligations as the vast amounts of CO2 these plants release inhibit efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.
Taylor is quoted on the Project Kea website as saying, “We cannot continue to keep burying our waste for future generations to deal with.” However, landfilling plays a significant role in SIRRL’s Project Kea plans. The company intends to landfill 100,000 tonnes of ash each year. Does his concern not extend to the burial of toxic ash for future generations?
When Mr Taylor returned to Waimate in March 2023, he said he wanted the first waste-to-energy plant in NZ to be his legacy. Well, would such a legacy need to include the dishonest way this company has promoted and sold this concept to the Waimate community?
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North & South magazine article.
Chinese government involvement.
In an article by George Driver titled ‘A Burning Question,‘ Paul Taylor was asked about the Chinese government’s involvement in China Tianying(CNTY), the 41% controlling shareholder of SIRRL. In his response, Taylor claimed he was unaware of the Chinese government’s shareholding. It’s hard to accept that Mr Taylor is unaware of the makeup of a company he has been closely involved with since first pitching an incinerator proposal for Westport in 2017.
Waste source
Taylor claims SIRRL has “understandings and agreements in place” with waste management companies that amount to a “significant chunk” of the 365,000 tonnes required. Taylor told N&S that the company has agreements with waste contractors “such as Waste Management, Envirowaste, and Ecowaste” that collect waste on behalf of councils. He also said, “It would be unwise for us to go and contract a lot more at this point—because there’s considerable interest from a number of the larger waste-collection companies — but for commercial reasons, we can’t really talk about it.”
The N&S article stated that the country’s largest waste-management companies and several South Island councils say they won’t send waste to the incinerator. Waste Management is the largest waste contractor in the country. Its managing director, Evan Maehl, says it has contracts for about a third of the South Island’s waste, has no agreement or understanding with SIRRL and would not supply waste to the plant.
Until recently, Waste Management was owned by Beijing Capital Group, which operates large waste-to-energy plants in China. Maehl said the company investigated building these plants in New Zealand and found it uneconomic. He says plants are only viable overseas with government subsidies.
“I don’t want to state the obvious,” he says, “but you’ve got the largest waste company in New Zealand, that used to be owned by a Chinese company that operated 10 of these facilities in China, so why aren’t we doing it?”
N&S also stated that the country’s second-largest waste management company, Enviro NZ (formerly Envirowaste), has no agreement or understanding with any proposed waste-to-energy incinerator. The company has waste and recycling collection contracts with councils, including Dunedin, Central Otago, Timaru, Mackenzie, Waimate, and West Coast.
ERP
ERP Group was recently liquidated after illegally storing waste in and around Christchurch. The company walked away, leaving landlords with a multimillion-dollar clean-up bill to remove thousands of bales of waste.
ERP had been baling the waste to supply fuel for the Project Kea incinerator in Waimate.
Paul Taylor told N&S that ERP Group had taken on the risk of the project, and “it certainly had nothing to do with SIRRL” (the company proposing the Glenavy plant, which is 40 per cent owned by Renew Energy). However, documents show Renew Energy applied for resource consent to store the waste near Christchurch. Environment Court documents state that Renew Energy owned the baled waste, while ERP Group held the resource consent for the uncompleted transfer station there.
OIA material sourced from Timaru District Council showed that Paul Taylor had tried to secure a heads of agreement with TDC on behalf of ERP Group to store waste at TDC’s Redruth landfill site. This was a last-ditch effort to find an alternative storage site to move thousands of bales of waste that ERP Group was storing illegally in Christchurch. Soon after, ERP was placed into liquidation.
This shows how closely ERP Group and Renew Energy were working together.
Distancing SIRRL from Renews previous failures
SIRRL has been eager to distance itself from the plants proposed on the West Coast, emphasising the project isn’t being driven by Renew Energy but by a new international joint venture. Taylor has said it is now “a much more robust company” and has conceded mistakes were made on the West Coast.
However, CNTY has been involved in every past W-t-E proposal with Renew Energy since 2018, when secret deals were signed between CNTY and then Buller Mayor Garry Howard in China without his council’s knowledge.
Importation of waste
When questioned for the N&S article about importing waste for Project Kea, Taylor was adamant that SIRRL won’t import waste, stating, “We would never embark on a plant if we thought that we were likely to have to import waste.” But, in 2018, when Stuff asked why the company was proposing a plant in Westport, Renew Energy’s then-chief executive David McGregor said: “One of the reasons for Westport was because of the port facilities. We can bring material from the [Pacific] Islands and Australia.”
The Waitaki waste management officer also asked Taylor at the Waimate information sessions in September 2021 if they would import waste. Taylor’s response was, “We have never really considered it.”
Burning of coal "never on the agenda"
In 2016, Buller Council business development facilitator John Hill said a waste-to-energy plant was being investigated in Buller because “it would be easier to obtain resource consents” for a plant there. “Two advantages of Buller,” he told the Westport News, “we’ve burned coal for years, we have consents in place already at Holcim for burning coal, and secondly, we’re not Nimby people — we tend not to object to activities.”
Taylor says the company never looked at burning coal in their plants. “It’s not something we were looking at,” he says. “We were looking purely at residual waste streams. It [coal] was never really on the agenda.” However, the MPI report said burning coal was one of the only things that made the project’s location make sense. “The rationale for establishing the facility in Buller is to have ready access to the waste coal, which will help to ensure minimum energy levels are generated,” the report said. “If the facility only made limited use of local feedstock, we would question the rationale for establishing it on the West Coast rather than being closer to the major sources of waste. However, the use of waste coal means the location makes more sense.”
Later that year, a report on economic development opportunities on the West Coast revealed Renew Energy was proposing an enormous facility that would rely on burning coal. It said it would “initially use 300,000 tonnes of waste annually to generate 60MW of power” and potentially double in scale after a few years. To put that into perspective, the entire West Coast sends about 11,000 tonnes of rubbish to landfills each year. The report said the plant would rely on burning municipal waste, waste coal, and tyres imported from around the South Island.
No agreement between CNTY and Buller District Council
In 2019, Stuff obtained emails showing Howard had signed an agreement with CNTY “in secret without the approval of his council” while in China. The agreement said, “the council would supply water, build a road to the plant, own the land, and lease it back to the company”, and would supply a landfill for toxic ash from the plant. Stuff reported that the full council considered none of these details. Taylor denies there was any agreement.