Ballance, with 45%+ of the NZ fertiliser market, sought an immediate injunction in the High Court in Sep 2018 to stop Quin Environmentals (QE) calling its Algerian RPR – an internationally acclaimed RPR to boot – an RPR. It failed. QE was just a start-up company simply trying to promote RPR as an environmentally-protective alternative P fertiliser. It had NO market at that time. So why throw huge staff and legal resources at it? Why had ‘Fertmark’ tried to ‘define’ RPR by a pathetic lab test – one used nowhere else in the world – rather than understand what a true RPR was, as a mineral? Instead, they demeaned real RPR by allowing the sale of blends of Sechura RPR and non-RPR as ‘RPR’.
Simply put, the industry knows how real RPR would improve NZ’s water quality, and therefore the threat it poses to what is called ‘superphosphate’ in NZ. The very high citric solubility of Sechura RPR in the Fertmark test – simply an artefact- allowed them to mix it with any other phosphate rock – including the Boucraa manufacturing slimes PB3 – and get the ‘Fertmark’ approval to call this mix an RPR. Good grief! It’s like marketing a junk V4 Capri as a Perana V8! So sad to see the end of investigative journalism in NZ. But I won’t stop, I promise.