This Climate Business

We are drowning in plastics, in our soil, our oceans, our food chain, and recently discovered as nanoparticles in our gut. Mmmmm nanoplastics. The government banned single-use plastics in 2019, and is phasing out hard-to-recycle plastics such as meat and vegetable packaging later this year, but what to replace them with? Well, Earthpac is a New Zealand business turning to the humble spud for a sol...

Few public debates get heated more quickly than the one around replacing kerbside parking with transit lanes or bike paths. How do we make the conversation about parking less polarising and more productive? For the answers, Ross Inglis spoke to Dr. Tim Welch , a Senior Lecturer at Auckland University’s School of Architecture and Planning. Tim, a very public advocate around cycling infrastructure,...

Electric vehicles are on their way, but is New Zealand’s grid ready for them? Christchurch-based Evnex makes clever chargers that refuel your car and let your lines company dynamically manage the load on its network. Evnex CEO and founder Ed Harvey told Ross Inglis about the magic behind the plug.

So much farmland – a million hectares according to one estimate – is mostly unfarmable because its erosion-prone, too steep, or inaccessible. In decades past that land might be destinated for forestry or just abandoned to return to scrub. Either way, the return on investment was poor. But now, thanks to the Emissions Trading Scheme, some of that land is destined to become permanent forest, with em...

Most of the population accepts that climate change is real. Most want to do something about it. But what shall we ask them to do? And what’s the best way to elicit a response? Recently the EECA, the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, released an updated version of their survey into attitudes towards climate change. The results show that who you are, where you live, and what you earn dic...

Comvita is much loved for its honey products - who doesn’t love bees and their fluffy bums. But a renewed focus on sustainability has seen the company present a robust strategic plan based on circular economy thinking. The plan, called Harmony, is a comprehensive relook at the entire operation and arrives at a time of restructuring and repositioning the company after a few tough years. To explain...

This month farmers are discussing their approach to managing GHG emissions - as the road show for He Waka Eke Noa comes to an end. He Waka Eke Noa is a joint industry-government-Māori initiative that’s investigating an alternative emissions programme for agriculture that’s outside the Emission Trading Scheme . If He Waka Eke Noa cannot come up with a suitable plan the Government may just fold the...

New Zealand’s transport system relies on fossil fuels. The technologies that heat our homes and businesses aren’t much better. What will it take to transition them towards zero-carbon alternatives? Dr. Richard Meade from Cognitus Economic Insight has tackled the question of Achieving a Timely, Efficient, Equitable and Orderly Transition to Net-Zero Emissions for Transport and Heating in New Zealan...

The job of transitioning the primary sector from cows to plants will be a long but necessary journey. So if you were looking for someone to show the way, you’d do worse than Jade Grey. He’s managed a farm and a supermarket butchery ran a meat processing plant in China, and launched a chain of pizza stores in Beijing called Gung Ho! Pizza, which was China's first B Corp certified Food and Beverage...

Every year, New Zealanders drive 35 billion kilometres by car – the equivalent of Earth to Mars and back 325 times. Māori and Pasifika miss out far more than other groups on visiting GPs because of lack of transport. Transport accounts for 43% of New Zealand's carbon dioxide emissions, and more than half of these come from private vehicles. This country’s transport system has problems. Finding sol...

There’s a thing called the SIN List. Standing for Substitute It Now, the list identifies the chemicals in our textiles, furniture, food, and daily life that are slowly poisoning us, killing our bodies and environment. Replacing that list with nature-based alternatives is the mission of Humblebee, the ambitious biotech startup of Veronica Harwood Stevenson. You may have heard of Humblebee, sometime...

I speak with Dr Terri-Ann Berry, Associate Professor at Auckland’s Unitec and the co-founder of the Environmental Solutions Research Centre and the aptly named Sustainable Construction Avengers. Each year, the construction and demolition industry creates 1.7 million tonnes of waste – making up 60% of total landfill. So much of that waste is recoverable, recyclable, and unnecessary. No one cares mo...

This week Vincent is joined by Professor Dave Frame, Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI) at Victoria University and a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the third part of our series on IPCC report, so Vincent asked if Dave could give us an insider’s view of how the IPCC works, on the science of warmi...

In more than 150 cities around the world, Covid 19 has been what you might call a shot in the arm for walking and cycling. To encourage social distancing, they added cycleways, extended footpaths and replaced parking spots with outdoor seating. What did New Zealand do? For the answer, we spoke to researcher Dr Kirsty Wild, co-author of a Waka Kotahi report into streetscape reallocation in this cou...

Buildings are responsible for around 20 percent of New Zealand’s carbon footprint. Which makes the building sector a critical part of the ambition to be  net-zero by 2050. And yet our homes are notoriously damp, cold, and energy inefficient. And get this, the construction sector emits the equivalent of one million cars on the road every year. Who knew? Andrew Eagles does. The chief executive of th...

Olivia Wannan is one of a handful of New Zealand journalists to attend COP26 in Glasgow, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful to watch as the world’s climate policy is argued and hopefully agreed to. Oliva is a climate reporter for Stuff.co.nz and she joined Vincent on the close of day five to talk about protestors, methane, and Indonesian reticence.

If you think you're seeing more e-bikes on the roads, you're not wrong. In New Zealand, their sales are soaring. But it wasn't always this way; the e-bike revolution started with motivated people and, in this country, one of the early movers was Mike Tritt, a former Greenpeace staffer who founded the retail chain Electrify NZ. Mike talked with co-host Ross Inglis about the business of e-bikes and...

Last week Climate Change Minister James Shaw’s announcement was met with stinging criticism. Generation Zero said it was a ‘disgrace’. Forest&Bird described it as a ‘clear lack of policy. Newsroom Marc Daalder called it ‘disappointment’. So what’s all this then? The criticism was a response to the just-announced Emissions Reduction Plan Discussion Document, which is neither a plan, nor a draft of...

How do you kickstart New Zealand’s hydrogen fuel network? Enter Ports of Auckland. It is one of the world’s first ports to open a hydrogen refuelling facility, the first stage in an ambitious plan that will eventually see the ports running on green hydrogen manufactured on-site. With a green hydrogen plant in the South Island now in scope and a fleet of hydrogen-fueled trucks already plying the ma...

Suburbs are the invention of another era. Far flung from the city centre, removed from places of work and largely made of stand-alone houses, suburbs could only have happened thanks to the motorcar. But with transport our second largest GHG emitter, it’s time to rethink the way we move – and it all starts with where we live. A clutch of new approaches are emerging, from intensification to careless...

If your family is like Vincent’s, then you’ll love meal kits but hate the packaging –polystyrene meat trays, foil bags and more plastic wrap than a Grey Lynn building site. Is there a way to get the convenience of a meal kit with the discernment of a sustainable shopper? Toby Skilton reckons there is. He and partner Elise Hilliam have launched MenuAid, a meal kit for the conscious consumer. 

New Zealand grows great oats and makes excellent oat milk, in Sweden. Yes NZ oats are shipped to Sweden where they are processed and returned to our shores to be bottled and sold as NZ-made. That hardly seems the sustainable alternative we all hope for. The madness of that scenario is finally being redressed by a new player - the Boring Oat Milk. Vincent speaks to Boring founder Morgan Maw.   Bori...

Coming up: an election you probably won’t vote in for an entity you’ve probably not heard of. That’s right, it’s the tri-annual vote for the Entrust board, the majority shareholder of Vector Energy, Auckland’s electrical lines company. But wait, before you turn over and go to sleep, this time around it’s different.  A consortium of climate campaigners and motivated professionals is challenging the...

This week Vincent is joined by Professor Dave Frame, Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI) at Victoria University and a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the third part of our series on IPCC report, so Vincent asked if Dave could give us an insider’s view of how the IPCC works, on the science of warmi...

This week, Vincent asks Rod Oram to explain the implications of the latest IPCC for business. Does the stark reality set out in the report change what’s required of the business sector? Or does it simply reinforce what’s already happening. How exactly is business, here and overseas, responding to the need to decarbonise? And who are the leaders and laggards in this journey? Rod Oram, is a climate...