We support Conscious Consumerism, where consumers are more aware of the choices they make when shopping and living day to day. We live in a time where most of us over-consume and look at price first and social/environmental impact second.

Why Organic – Organic food is food grown the way nature intended – without synthetic pesticides or herbicides, genetic modification, or man-made fertilisers. Organic farming prioritises the long-term health of the soil and the environment, ensuring the land can yield nutritious, sustainable food for years to come.

Non-organic food is food grown with ample intervention, often involving harmful chemicals and pesticides. Non-organic farming practices tend to strip nutrients from the soil, have adverse effects on the environment, and leave worrying traces of pesticides on our food.

True Cost of Food Production – The predominant approaches to food production, distribution, retailing and consumption are causing significant damage to the environment, to soil, to the climate, to biodiversity, to rural communities and to public health. We are either paying for this damage in hidden ways, for instance through water quality, the alarming contamination of our waterways, taxes which fund misdirected agricultural subsidies and environmental clean up costs, including many of those relating to flooding. We are also paying the costs of diet-related disease. These costs are often deferred on to future generations or other countries, as is currently the case with climate change and soil degradation, rainforest destruction and species extinction. So although food appears never to have been cheaper, when we look beneath the surface, we are actually paying far more for it than we might possibly imagine.

WASTE MINIMISATION & THE RE-USE REVOLUTION

Every unit of material sent to waste carries a disposal cost. However the true cost of waste is more than just the cost of disposal. It also includes the additional cost of raw materials, energy and labour involved in making the product in the first place. This can be 5–20 times higher than the cost of disposal. New Zealanders dispose of an estimated 2.46 million tonnes of waste to landfills each year (Ministry for the Environment 2011). Plastic waste represents an estimated 8% by weight of landfill. This means approximately 200,000 tonnes of plastic ends up in our landfills each year of which roughly half is packaging*.

There’s no future in single-use; and that includes single-use takeaway containers and packaging. We have to find a better alternative that protects our planet’s natural reserves, minimises emissions and resource use, and connects communities. Reuse is the way forward, and single use packaging and takeaway containers is the perfect place to start! Compostable or biodegrable products are a starting point but they cannot be the solution. They still encourage single-use waste and involve a complex process of producing, transporting and disposing.  Our Reuse Revolution goal is to reduce the amount of single-use containers, both recyclable and compostable, that go into landfill.