The billions of tonnes of plastic in our oceans isn’t going away any time soon, but innovative companies here and abroad are working together to find silver linings to this daunting problem.

Fishing boats head out to sea and set their nets. They go back to shore. They head back out, the nets are pulled up, and the boats go back to shore with the day’s catch.

It’s a rhythm of daily life familiar the world over, one that’s barely changed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But since the early 1950s humans have created 8.3 billion tonnes of plastics, and a scary amount of that – an estimated eight million tonnes every year – has ended up in our oceans.  

It’s a tragedy, a disaster on an almost unimaginable scale. And, of course, it’s changed things dramatically for many of those who work on the fishing boats. But humans adapt, because what else can we do? In the Java Sea, which lies between Indonesia’s four most populous islands, you’ll find an example of this in action. 

A network of 300-400 independent fishermen set their nets in the afternoon and then go back empty, and then out again in the morning to collect their fish, as they have always done. “But now, they’re collecting trash on their way back,” explains Per Martin Mortensen, who heads up business development for Danish packaging company Pack Tech’s ocean waste plastic arm. 

“And it’s not like they’re doing a detour,” he adds. “It’s all over the place. The trash they remove today is there again tomorrow.”

It’s depressing, yes, but this is the reality now – and the silver lining of this horrific trash problem is a new source of income has been created for these fishermen, some of whom earn as much or even more through collecting rubbish than they do from fishing.

What’s more, the rubbish they’re collecting – or a decent amount of it, anyway – is not simply going to landfill, it’s being turned into something of value. This is where Pack Tech, which has been working with ocean waste plastic since 2013, and now collects and reuses 1400 tons each year, come in.

The aim isn’t about getting rid of all the plastic in our oceans – a Sisyphean task is ever there was one – or even from the Java Sea. It’s about helping local communities to make a difference, and make a living while they’re at it, while at the same time creating a product for which there is demand: recycled plastic packaging. 

“We can’t take it all,” says Mortensen. “We could send out big trawlers full of diesel but it’s not the way to go for us.”

Jason Hodson, Australia and New Zealand sales director for Pack Tech’s ocean waste plastics division, agrees. “Getting the infrastructure to collect the product on a big enough scale and on a sustainable scale is the hardest bit.

“The most important thing is now we’re putting a commercial value on waste plastic, and once you put a commercial value on something it becomes a commodity and a commodity will be traded and will have an industry built around it.”

After the waste is collected, it’s sorted locally into different plastic types and colours, then sent further afield for more sorting before being rinsed, melted down and processed into pellets. The process is long and involved, as the more sorting processes involved, the purer the resulting resin plastic will be. It’s a much more expensive process than making regular petrochemical plastic. 

“The supply chain for virgin resin from crude oil has been around for a long time so it’s very streamlined,” explains Hodson. “It’s been tendered over the years to a very finite cost, but the price of this process will drop over time.

“We can’t say we’re going to set up a collection and distribution plan and set a base level of a million tonnes – you can’t do that without an industry supporting it, so it’s always an incremental step.”

Pack Tech supplies ocean waste plastic to companies all over the world, stipulating that they must use at least 25% of it in their products. The first New Zealand brand to get on board is ecostore, which has gone the whole hog with a limited-edition 100% ocean waste plastic bottle for its Ocean Breeze hand wash. Twenty thousand have been made using over half a tonne  of ocean waste plastic, and they retail for the same price ($5.99) as ecostore’s other hand wash products despite the material being more expensive than what’s usually used – plastic sustainably sourced from sugarcane. Sugar plastic is already twice the price of petrochemical plastic, but ecostore believes it’s the right investment to make. 

“People need to vote with their wallets,” says Tony Morpeth, ecostore’s general manager of operations and procurement. “Consumers’ behaviour needs to change – they need to be prepared to support and invest in change because cheap and nasty is done – we need to put that to bed and move on to something more sustainable.”

It’s tempting to think plastic-polluted oceans are chiefly an issue in far-flung, heavily populated lands. But the ecostore team is intimately acquainted with the problem here in Aotearoa, having partnered with non-profit organisation Sea Cleaners to build awareness as they developed the ocean waste plastic hand wash.

Hayden Smith, the founding trustee of the Sea Cleaners project, took the team out on an eye-opening clean-up mission in the Waitematā Harbour so they could see the reality. Since 2002, Smith and his team have removed over 8.5 million litres of rubbish from the ocean, using four vessels to get into hard-to-reach waterways as well as working with schools and local communities on education. 

The bulk of the waste goes to landfill, says Smith. “The debris we’re collecting is so contaminated with mud, sand and silt that we’ve been told by multiple recyclers it’s just not deemed usable,” he says. 

The future potential of working with innovators like Pack Tech excites him, but for now, the focus is on education. “We can’t just be that ambulance at the bottom of the cliff,” says Smith. “While we’ve got boats going out and doing the work everyday, we’re also working with schools on a weekly basis.

“We’ve had some very positive success come out of relationships with the schools – we’ve seen positive behaviour changes from the students, we’ve seen schools taking the lead to make sure it remains at front of mind.”

Smith has been running sea-cleaning projects of various forms since 2002, and while the scale of the problem remains huge and isn’t about to go away any time soon – the Sea Cleaners team regularly finds plastic waste that’s up to 40 years old – what has changed is people’s attitudes.

“Back in 2002, no one knew this problem even existed – it was an issue that was out of sight, out of mind,” he says. “No one had put two and two together to see the reality of what was happening with the quantities of rubbish in our oceans. 

“But now, 17-and-a-half years on, everyone actually knows about the issue. I think we’ve seen a huge jump towards the mainstream in the last couple of years, particularly with the supermarkets kickstarting the banning of plastic bags, and now the government coming on board to legislate against those bags – that has absolutely helped bring this issue to the forefront, and everyone now understands the need for it.”

Now we just need to start acting on it. 

This content was created in paid partnership with ecostore. Learn more about our partnerships here. 

Think you’ve got your KiwiSaver sorted? Try Kōura’s ‘robo-advice’ questionnaire and you might be surprised.

If a person who looks like they know about finance asks you whether your appetite for risk is low, medium or high, what do you say? The problem is most Kiwis don’t understand what the question means, or the consequences the answer has for their savings, says Rupert Carlyon, co-founder of new KiwiSaver scheme Kōura. 

“When it comes to investing people don’t understand the definition of high, medium and low risk. To them ‘high risk’ means ‘would I be willing to lose all my money?’”

KiwiSaver providers are not having the right conversations with their clients to make sure they are aware of the decisions they need to make for their retirement, he says. As a result, New Zealanders are missing out on crucial savings. 

Kōura has done research which shows that more than half of KiwiSavers are in a fund that is not the right type them. This includes the 20% of people who are languishing in low-return default funds. It’s now been 12 years since KiwiSaver launched and the industry is not working quite as it should, Carlyon says. 

“It really astounds me that we have been talking about this problem now for the past five years yet we have not done anything to address the problem. I think the industry is too busy talking about how great KiwiSaver is as a result of the significant take-up, yet have not stopped to think is the product working as well as it should.”

Kōura surveyed one thousand people to assess their risk appetite and savings objectives. They discovered that not only were half in the wrong fund, but only 53% of those under 45 were in a growth fund. It also found the majority of those not in a growth fund wanted to prioritise the growth of their assets over volatility – a clear indicator of a high-risk tolerance. 

Those people are foregoing the opportunity to earn better returns from higher-risk funds while they still have plenty of working years ahead of them to absorb the inevitable ups and downs of financial markets, Carlyon says. 

“Realistically all of those people should be in a growth fund. There are 1.8 million people under 45 in KiwiSaver who have $38 billion invested collectively. Our rough estimate is that just being in the wrong set of funds has cost that group about $2.5 billion over the last couple of years.”

Kōura is a next-generation KiwiSaver plan that is addressing this advice gap with its easy-to-use digital advice platform – known to those in the trade as “robo-advice”. Two years ago industry regulator the Financial Markets Authority changed the rules to allow personalised robo-advice, and has since issued several licences. But Carlyon doesn’t think anyone else in the industry has got it right yet.

“When I look at some of the tools that currently exist around retirement planning, it’s too complicated. The everyday person wants to be able to sit there without thinking too hard and get to the answer in a few minutes from the comfort of their couch.

“They don’t want to have to play around with 16 different buttons and inputs to try and figure out where and how they do stuff.”

Kōura’s research has allowed them to simplify the risk categorisation process to three short and simple questions. They also consider more than just risk appetite when designing a portfolio. They learn about an investor’s greater financial objectives: are they using their KiwiSaver just for retirement, or is it part of their tactics to buy a first home. Then they ask how important KiwiSaver is to those objectives.

This is where Kōura’s understanding of what questions need to be asked is essential. International research on robo-advice shows that in order to properly identify how much risk an investor is willing to tolerate you need to ask the same thing several times in slightly different ways, he says. Thus Kōura’s online tool asks people a set of questions about how they would react to a fall in the markets, rather than “what’s your risk appetite?”

“If you ask them the same thing slightly differently and it comes up with different answers you know to score them a lower risk profile.

“If they answer consistently in a certain way, then it’s pretty clear where you get to.”

This conversation has never been had with KiwiSavers, he says. Asked about risk straight out many would say they’re not high risk, and that means they won’t end up in a growth fund when they potentially should.

Once Kōura has the information it creates a portfolio for the individual person out of its six separate funds. One of the constraints on other KiwiSaver providers is that they have rigid “conservative, balanced and growth” fund structures so it’s harder for them to personalise schemes for people.

“What we are most proud of is that we’re giving people real advice to explain why we recommend a specific portfolio and giving them information on the implications of that recommendation so they can make an informed decision. 

“We’re telling them how it’s going to change over time, because fundamentally KiwiSaver is not a set and forget product, as much as everyone would like to think it is. We do need them to change and de-risk as they get older.”

The feature of the Kōura advice model that has got people more interested than anything else is the “what will my weekly income be when I’m 65” figure – “because that is the most relevant number of all,” Carlyon says.

Kōura has been set up by Carlyon and Hobson Wealth, a private wealth advisory firm managed by KiwiSaver veteran Warren Couillault. Kōura is Couillault’s third KiwiSaver scheme, having previously established the Fisher Funds and Generate schemes.

Carlyon spent 10 years working in investment banking with UBS in Auckland and London, before working in a variety of other roles at Vector, Tower and KPMG and figuring out that personal finance was where he wanted to be.

His career has been built on giving people good advice, he says.

“This is aimed at a slightly different crowd, but it’s the same. Advice is not about telling people what to do, it’s about giving people information and allowing them to be confident to make their own decisions. I hope that our tools give people the information and advice they need to allow them to make the right decision.  

“We give people advice. I think we’re actually competing against the financial advisers rather than competing against the other KiwiSaver providers.”

This content was created in paid partnership with Kōura. Learn more about our partnerships here.