The Latest from Footprint: Business Sustainability https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/ NZME A long-term approach to sustainability is not only great for New Zealand… it’s great for business.  Footprint: Business Sustainability is a brand new podc 2024-03-28T12:36:43.607Z en Footprint: Business Sustainability - Episode 6: Food https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-6-food/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-6-food/ Cut your food budget by a third.  Lockdown grocery bills have once again got Kiwis asking why we’re spending so much at the supermarket.  Whether prices are actually rising, or it’s just shoppers’ perception the issue is currently under investigation by the Commerce Commission. But the good news for shoppers, is there is a way most of us could significantly cut our grocery bills overnight.  All we need to do, is avoid food waste.  It's estimated that globally, we throw away around a third of food made for human consumption. This is also responsible for up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions.  Hugh Campbell is a professor of sociology at Otago University specialising in food, agriculture and sustainability.  He says food production damages the environment in many ways, from nitrogen run-off, to water usage.  He says the easiest way to reduce this impact is by looking at the way we dispose of food.  "Food waste is both a major challenge for us, but one of our huge opportunities for improving the sustainability profile of farming and food".  Thankfully, some innovative Kiwis like Michal Garvey are coming up with modern ways to fix this long-standing problem.  Michal has developed an app called Foodprint, where you can buy imperfect and excess food from eateries for a discount, to prevent it from being thrown away.  "Anything from a whole cake, to a salad sandwich, to sushi.  We throw away about a third of food that is produced for human consumption.  It's just a waste of resources, and a problem we shouldn't have”.  She says the problem is so big that if food waste was a country it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, only behind China and the United States.  Michal’s app started in Auckland, and now operates in Dunedin and Wellington, with new food businesses joining all the time.  For more ways on how we can prevent food waste, listen to the latest episode of “Footprint”, the sustainability podcast from Newstalk ZB and Goodman Property.  2021-12-07T23:48:43.000Z Footprint: Business Sustainability - Episode 5: Fashion https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-5-fashion/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-5-fashion/ Dressing up sustainability  One thing we all have in common, is the need to buy clothes.  The only thing that changes is where you sit on the clothes-buying spectrum.  Are you a slave to the whims of fast fashion, or a fan of perusing your local op-shop?  Is clothes buying a joyful hobby, or an extremely reluctant chore?  No matter where you sit, there are clearly choices that are better for the environment than others.  Unfortunately, far too many people are merrily purchasing fast fashion with little thought to the impact they’re having – and that impact can be huge.  On average, every item of clothing purchased around the world is worn just seven times before getting chucked out.  Research shows people don’t even wear half the clothes in their wardrobe.  All of this adds up to the fashion industry making up 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than international air travel and shipping combined.  In New Zealand we send an average of 44kg of textiles to landfill per year, per person. While half of that is carpet, that’s still a whopping amount of clothing and fashion industry off-cuts ending up in the dump.  Thankfully, there are some Kiwis taking a look at how we can reduce clothing’s carbon footprint.  Bernadette Casey is a sustainability consultant and co-founder of Usedfully - a low carbon clothing system that re-uses textiles.  She works in what she calls the ‘unfashionable side of fashion’ – what happens to clothes once we’ve finished wearing them.  She says in New Zealand, policymakers have been focused on waste, which doesn’t tell the whole story.  “Textiles only make up about five to six percent of local landfill.  But their carbon impacts are about 30%.  Their weight to impact ratio is really outsized.  New Zealand policy has been really grounded in volume rather than impact.  Clothing generates about 3 times its weight in CO2 when it’s in landfill”.  She says it might all sound grim, but all the clothing waste we’re producing actually presents us with an opportunity.  “If we think about (used textiles) as resources, they can go into a number of different applications, and have a number of different lives.”  She gives the example of breaking old cotton garments into cellulose, which can then be used to make roading.  “They’re not sexy projects, but they’re really practical and worthwhile.  They generate jobs, economic opportunities and decarbonise at the same time”.  For more great Kiwi projects working to improve sustainability of clothing and textiles, listen to the latest episode of “Footprint”, the sustainability podcast from Newstalk ZB and Goodman Property.  2021-11-25T01:51:45.000Z Footprint: Business Sustainability - Episode 4: Construction https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-4-construction/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-4-construction/ Building a more sustainable world  We often talk about sustainability as things we’re doing at home, to make our day-to-day lives ‘greener’.  But it’s not just about the things like recycling or conserving water.  Sustainability can start quite literally with the building itself.  From the way construction materials are sourced, to the dumping of waste, the impact construction has on the environment is varied, and significant.  The Green Building Council says New Zealand's construction industry is responsible for about 20% of total carbon emissions.  About half of that is from the way we use buildings, and half is the construction process.  The Council’s Director of Market Transformation, Sam Archer, says four or five materials make up 80-90% of construction emissions; cement, steel, aluminium glass and timber. He says this means the industry understands which areas should be focused on.  “Taking the cement industry for example, in the past few years they’ve reduced emissions by about 30%.  At Golden Bay cement they are taking waste timber and burning it instead of coal for the heat to make cement.”  But he wants construction to not only look at how things are built, but how they perform afterwards.  "You need to be monitoring buildings in use, and make sure they’re set up properly and they run properly.”  He wants a system where existing commercial buildings’ performance is monitored, like it is in Australia.  The traditional players in the construction industry are making changes to the way they do things.  But some new players are bringing totally out of the box solutions to construction’s carbon problem.  One of these is Ged Finch, a 27-year-old who’s invented a sustainable construction system called X Frame.  It’s made of standardised plywood pieces that you literally bang together with a rubber mallet, so the materials are recoverable, reusable and create very little waste.  You can hear more about construction innovations like X Frame on the latest episode of “Footprint”, the sustainability podcast from Newstalk ZB and Goodman Property.  2021-11-09T22:00:45.000Z Footprint: Business Sustainability - Episode 3: Recycling https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-3-recycling/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-3-recycling/ Is it still worth recycling?   For years, recycling has been commonplace for Kiwi households.  Milk bottles, newspapers, baked bean tins - a lot of us are cheerfully chucking it in the recycling bin and patting ourselves on the back for doing our bit.  But more recently, questions are being asked about what actually happens to our recycling. There is concern about whether we’re just exporting our waste offshore, to become a poorer country’s problem and councils collecting our recycling are battling ongoing issues with the quality of what’s going in those bins. But according to one expert, it’s always worth recycling. Marty Hoffart has been an expert and advocate in waste minimisation for over two decades. He’s the chairman at Zero Waste Network New Zealand and director of the Tauranga based consultancy ‘Waste Watchers’. He says if waste is able to be recycled, it’s always worth recycling it. “You’d never say it's better to go back and get more oil out of the ground and send it over from Saudi Arabia on a ship [rather than use recycled plastic] to make another plastic toy”.  He uses the simple example of a can of drink. "If you dig up some bauxite in Australia, put it in a big truck, we sent it to the port on a train, that ship comes to New Zealand, down to Tiwai point, and we use an enormous amount of power to make an aluminium can. That can gets filled with a drink, someone buys it from a shop and walks down the street and chucks it in a council street litter bin - then we have to repeat that whole process again. So if we can recover that can through recycling, we basically save 95-97 percent of the energy (and pollution) required to make that can from scratch”.  Marty Hoffart says food, green waste and glass are all recycled locally, large number of plastics are starting to be recycled here, as well as about half of paper and cardboard. Plastic and aluminium are still being exported to be recycled overseas.  To hear more about the best ways to recycle, listen to Newstalk ZB and Goodman Property’s latest episode of the Footprints podcast, here.  2021-10-27T03:43:42.000Z Footprint: Business Sustainability - Episode 2: Plastic https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-2-plastic/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-2-plastic/ When plastic’s not fantastic.  If you think we’re getting plastic waste under control, you’re sadly mistaken.  As a society, we’ve had a collective awakening about how much we rely on plastic for every part of our lives.  But for all the efforts we’re now making, we are very far from reducing the amount of plastic in the world.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  Dr Trisia Farrelly is an environmental anthropologist and political ecologist at Massey University, and her research has focused on waste management and plastics.  She says at the moment, we’re looking at 368 million metric tons of virgin plastics produced annually, and the production is expected to double by 2040.  Dr Farrelly says plastic is a complex problem, and we can't rely on recycling to solve it.  "Plastic is coming down in rain, it’s in the Antarctic, it’s carried country to country on migratory species, we’re seeing it in the human body, we’re seeing the chemicals associated with plastics in a mother’s milk.  It’s literally everywhere.  Because the stuff really doesn’t go away, it breaks up and leaches out, the more of it we can stop producing and removing the better we’re going to be."  But there are several innovative local businesses who are doing their bit to make a dent in the dilemma. Rebecca Percasky is co-founder of the Better Packaging Company who is making compostable courier bags. This ground-breaking product was just the beginning of a successful growing business, now shipping to 52 countries worldwide. One of the kinds of plastic we can recycle on-shore, is the soft plastic often used to wrap foods. This is thanks to Waiuku’s Future Post, which is an exciting Kiwi business doing its bit to turn the tide of plastic heading to the dump.  At Future Post, they’re taking the soft plastic from collection points in supermarkets and turning it into fence posts.   This is the brainchild of Jerome Wenzlick, who is a farmer and fencer who wondered why we were making fenceposts out of wood, while sending thousands of tons of plastic to landfills.  He says there are two main benefits to what he’s creating.  “When the post is in the ground, there’s nothing leaching out of the post (like with a wooden post).  We’re also diverting waste from landfill, from littering the countryside, and turning it into something useful."  To hear more about Future Post, and for more tips on how you can make a difference, listen to episode two of Newstalk ZB’s new podcast series, Footprint: Business Sustainability, thanks to Goodman Property.  2021-10-12T19:56:17.000Z Footprint: Business Sustainability - Episode 1: Transport https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-1-transport/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/podcasts/footprint-business-sustainability/footprint-business-sustainability-episode-1-transport/ Most people can agree that tackling climate change is one of the biggest issues we’ll face in our lifetimes. But it can seem impossible to work out how we can each do our part.  Is it using a keep cup?  Is it eating less meat? In reality, one of the biggest parts of the puzzle for Kiwis, is addressing our transport emissions.  They make up over 40% of our human carbon emissions, and we’ve got the highest car-ownership rate in the OECD.  Kiwis love their cars. Luckily, there are some exciting local companies who’re here to help us to tackle our reliance on zipping around in our personal cars.  Kirsten Corson is the CEO of Zilch, an EV car-sharing company that gives anyone the opportunity to borrow an electric vehicle and just drop it off when we're finished with it.  They’re also helping businesses establish EV car-sharing fleets for their employees.  Kirsten says it’s easy for Kiwis to think we can’t make a difference to climate change.  But she says a third of global emissions come from small countries like ours, so we have a significant role to play.  Kirsten’s business is all about making it easier to do our bit.  “It’s really hard for people to transition to electric vehicles when you think about the higher cost of the car and charging infrastructure.  So we’re the only car-sharing business that has all pure electric vehicles in its fleet.  So it’s a cost-effective and a really easy way to be able to transition to an electric vehicle without all the hassle and the cost.” According to Kirsten, we’re making a billion and a half car trips a year.  A third of those, are two kilometres or less.  She reckons a huge proportion of those could be replaced with walking, scootering, or using car-share services like Zilch.  But journeys that are a little longer, present a different set of challenges.  One of the most common concerns people have with EVs is ‘range anxiety’ – or being sure you’re going to find enough charging stations to finish your journey.   That's where another Kiwi company called ChargeNet comes in.  They've been installing high-speed chargers up and down the country.  CEO Steve West says it began when he brought the first Tesla Model S into the country and wanted to show it off way back in 2015.  He fast worked out that New Zealand needed a public network of chargers, which is what he went about arranging.  He thinks it’s made a huge difference.  “People have a list of reasons to not go electric. They usually start with things like the price, but if you can get past that, then there’s the objection of ‘well I’ve got nowhere to charge it’.  I think we’ve solved that for people with 270 stations”. To hear more about Kiwi companies like Zilch and ChargeNet, listen to episode one of Footprints, thanks to Goodman Property. 2021-10-12T19:18:06.000Z