New Plymouth residents are marking a milestone in their long-running battle to have a toxic chemical plant cleaned up.
For 25 years the Ivon Watkins-Dow plant made the herbicide 2,4,5,-T, which was also a component of Agent Orange.
The company, now known as Dow, has agreed to fund remediation of the land.
But there are still local concerns about the extent of the cleanup.
Not much remains of the factory once synonymous with toxic chemicals. Most of it was demolished last year. But for residents and former workers the past is not so easy to erase.
"It would be nice to think the place was gone and the memory of the place was gone but I don't know if that's possible," said former Ivon Watkins employee Jimmy Stoppard.
From the 1960s to the late 80s the herbicide 2,4,5,-T was made here - which has been linked to birth defects and cancers.
Stoppard remembers surfing where the stormwater pipe from the factory fed straight onto the beach. He's in remission for stage 4 lymphoma.
"Sometimes out in the water, the water didn't even taste like salt water. And as kids our attitude was well they'd never put anything down here that would hurt us," he said.
Now, decades later, Dow, the owner of the controversial former chemical plant, is digging into its history, interviewing past employees about where chemicals were dumped then sampling the soil to uncover the extent of the contamination.
"There's a lot of poison that's been buried in the environment for a long time, and we've got the commitment from them that they're going to be transparent and clean it up," said New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom.
The council's been told the cost to remediate could be around $40 or $50 million.
"It'll really depend on the concentrations and whether things can be removed," said Abby Matthews, director environmental quality at Taranaki Regional Council.
"Sometimes moving things around like soil can actually mobilise contaminants as well, so they need to work through that really carefully in terms of looking at what options are available for them."
This area should be prime real estate in New Plymouth. Instead it's 16 hectares of polluted land. And for those who live adjacent to it, it's land that still holds many unanswered questions.
"Do they dig it up? If they dig it up, where do they move the contaminated soil to?" Stoppard asked.
"What is the real legacy? Is this just a greenwash for where the bulk of the dioxin really is?" dioxin campaigner Andrew Gibbs added.
Gibbs pointed to the fact that an unknown amount of dioxin waste was dumped in a lined landfill down the road at Waireka in 1985.
"Dow have never released what's in there and probably never will," he said.
"At which point in history does the plastic liner start to break down and what the hell's in there?"
Eventually this could be a park planted with natives.
"When I say safe, you want it safe so that potentially kids can sit down there and play on the ground," Holdom said.
Hoping that for future generations 'dioxin' is no longer a familiar word.
