By Cas Saunders
The Dunedin City Council has been urged to reconsider the use of a possibly carcinogenic herbicide in public spaces.
Speaking in public forum at a Dunedin City Council meeting this week, Anna-Marie Mirfin, called for the council to re-examine its use of the weedkiller glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup.
She pointed to a 2021 report by the Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility, which outlined issues with glyphosate, including herbicide resistance, and inadequate risk assessment around its use.
The World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) labelled the herbicide "probably carcinogenic in humans".
The report led several countries to ban or restrict its use.
In 2016, Christchurch City Council reduced usage of the herbicide in residential areas, but still used it in the red-zone.
The Dunedin City Council currently sprays the herbicide on footpaths and areas that surround private dwellings.
Residents concerned with the practice could opt out and be put on a no-spray list to avoid the herbicide being sprayed around their homes, Ms Mirfin said.
This did not go far enough and Ms Mirfin was concerned about its widespread use, given there had been no formal risk assessment of its effect on New Zealand biota and the environment.
Ms Mirfin hoped the council would look at alternative ways to deal with weeds in the city.
"There is an opportunity to rethink our relationships with the urban environment," Ms Mirfin said.
Cr Jim O’Malley acknowledged Ms Mirfin was not the first person to submit to the council on the topic.
Cr O’Malley suggested the council start by looking into how successful Christchurch City Council had been in reducing the use of the herbicide and form an opinion based upon those findings.
Cr David Benson-Pope said he planned to raise the issue at the infrastructure services committee meeting and investigate alternatives that had been used in the past to deal with weeds in Dunedin.
"In the mists of time these concerns have been raised and they haven’t gone away," Cr Benson-Pope said about the alternative methods for weed-killing council had tried in the past.
"It didn’t just try steam, it tried fire and god knows what else."
Cr Sophie Barker said the issue should be raised during the Dunedin Botanic Garden Plan.
Cas Saunders is a journalism student at Massey University
