The Council has a range of environmental scientific skills - a chemistry laboratory, biology laboratory, and experts in topics such as freshwater and marine biology, wastewater engineering, groundwater, surface water movement, water chemistry and air pollution.
However, the Council also uses sources apart from its own monitoring, to gather information about the environment and the activities of resource consent holders.
Where companies are able and willing to provide their own monitoring information, then this information becomes part of the total monitoring programme, and Council staff can reduce their own involvement that would otherwise be necessary. The company is often carrying out the monitoring anyway, for process control or because of their own environmental policies.
They may also have a range of specialist skills that the Council may not possess, and be able to provide additional information. The company benefits by a reduction in the costs of the Council's monitoring programme.
In such circumstances, the Council retains an auditing role, for example by way of inter-laboratory comparative analyses, to ensure that the quality of the information supplied is acceptable.