Description:

Kōrihi te manu, tākiri mai i te ata.
Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea. Tehei mauri ora!
As the bird sings to greet the dawn, a new day begins ... Behold, there is life!

No Trace Waste is helping people and business transition to a future where all single-use packaging is naturally biodegradable.

As the world continues to hurtle toward ecological disaster, consumers are taking stock of the waste they make and demanding less single-use plastics. A prime example of this is the 300 million disposable coffee cups used in New Zealand each year. Until recently, all of these cups have contained a plastic lining making them difficult to compost and impossible to recycle. As a result, it is estimated that 97.5 percent of coffee cups in New Zealand end up in landfills, or worse, as litter releasing microplastics into our environment.

No Trace Waste is packaging designed to disappear. We are pioneering truly home compostable solutions that use a waterbased dispersion coating. They look, feel and act just like a regular disposable cup but will break down naturally in almost any environment.

This novel new generation of packaging liberates coffee drinkers from an everyday piece of plastic waste, while also helping businesses to create all new experiences designed to add value to our soils at the end of life.

An example of this is our partnership with Rotorua Ziplines who, with mana whenua Ngāti Pikiao, provide an entertaining but also educational tourism experience that allows each visitor to contribute to the establishment of a new native forest on the banks of the Ōkere awa (Kaituna river).

Half way through the zipline journey, each group stops for some fresh kawakawa tea using leaves from local plants while their guide tells the history of the whenua and their kaupapa to restore the ngahere. This requires a cup that has the hygiene and convenience of single-use but doesn’t create any waste.

With No Trace Waste, each person finishes their tea and is given a native tree that they place in our cup and plant in the ground. The cup provides a vessel to protect the tree from soil shock (temperature, moisture, acidity) and as the tree grows the cup breaks down, feeding the tree.

An elegant solution allowing every visitor to contribute to the reforestation of six hectares of iwi land that was previously used for grazing.