Image: Archi Banal

PodcastsOctober 19, 2022

With access to the right tools, businesses are becoming more sustainable

Business is Boring host

Image: Archi Banal

Over the past 20 years, Sustainable Business Network has taken sustainable business practice from the fringes to front and centre. Founder and CEO Rachel Brown tells Business is Boring how all businesses can improve their impact.

The Sustainable Business Network has been at the forefront of advocacy and community in New Zealand business for around 20 years, helping businesses understand their environmental impact and improve how they carry out business.

Over this time the ideas they advance have gone from the fringe of business thinking, to being at the heart of many great companies and the centre of the conversation – in large part because of the work of the people in the network, and its leadership.

Founder and CEO Rachel Brown joined Simon Pound on Business is Boring to talk about the journey of founding the Sustainable Business Network, the sustainability issues and opportunities facing business today and how businesses can access tools to do better in every way.

Sustainable Business Network founder and CEO, Rachel Brown (Image: Supplied)

Listen to Business is Boring, the award-winning weekly podcast series brought to you by The Spinoff and Spark Lab. Host Simon Pound talks to everyone from accidental entrepreneurs to industry leaders about their business journeys and what propelled them to where they are today.

Follow Business is Boring on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

Simon Pound: How did you become interested in sustainability?

Rachel Brown: My parents were both science teachers. I grew up hanging out in mangrove swamps with my mum, and my dad used to love doing [science experiments] like making bombs and making these extraordinary loud bangs. So I kind of grew up with it. But my parents were very keen on social and environmental issues, so we learned a lot about that growing up.

I went through university and got a science degree, not surprisingly, and then I went overseas. I grew up in a time when New Zealand was pretty egalitarian, it was pretty clean, and then I travelled the world for three and a half years and that was the first time I ever saw pollution and poverty at the scale you just never saw here. That really affected me. I saw massive businesses in places that were quite poor, that were belching out pollution into the area where these people were having to live and they didn’t have a choice. I felt really concerned about that, and came back to New Zealand and did some more study, and learnt all about the role that business can play in sustainability.

I started working for council, which was fun, because it was Bob Harvey at the time, who was the mayor of Waitākere. While I was doing that, I got frustrated with people in the business space, who I was meant to be working with, expecting me to do things like sort out their parking issues, or move some signs or something like that, when I wanted to talk to them about the state of the planet, and a better way of doing business. So I left and set up an organisation called the Environmental Business Network.

That eventually merged with another organisation, which was the Businesses for Social Responsibility, and that’s kind of how the SBN started.

Tell me about how you decided to use business as the vehicle to advance sustainability causes, rather than like an activism or political solution – because that wasn’t the norm when you started.

What I saw when I was working for council was it was filled with great people, but it’s very rules-focused and it’s not very innovative. Then I’d be out there talking to businesspeople and I just felt like they were bright-eyed, bushy tailed, they could see solutions and they could innovate quickly, particularly SMEs. So I became excited about “how do we get these people together, grow a network of like-minded people who can share ideas and get excited?”

So what does the Sustainable Business Network do today?

We do a lot of capability building for business, because there’s a lot of businesses out there who are short on time, they don’t know what they’re meant to be doing and are also concerned about cash flow. So what we’ve been doing is working with a bunch of different private and public sector partners to create really useful tools.

We do a lot of hand holding of business. Digital tools are useful, but actually businesses like to learn together. So we bring people together to do the learning together. How do you do a carbon footprint? What does that look like? And then how do I market it without greenwashing?

We also do a lot with our really progressive, awesome companies. We do a lot of showcasing and telling people that it’s possible. One of the excuses that I hear is “Yeah, that can happen overseas, but it can’t happen here.” And that’s just not right. The problem is we don’t hear enough about those amazing, innovative, circular, sustainable, regenerative companies.

Brokering is another role that we have. We have a directory, a list of organisations that have already got the solutions out there, that are super hard to find, or have been, and now we’ve got one place people can go to and find them much easier. So we bring the procurement option, anyone who’s looking to buy sustainably, to this group of people.

What advice would you have for someone who does want to change their impact and improve what they’re up to in their business?

Our network is really about being practical – getting things done. We don’t do a lot of lobbying, we inform, but really it’s about getting stuff done. So I would say join, have a chat with one of the people in the team to understand how we can help, and then just get cracking. There are so many tools and resources out there nowadays, you just just need to get creative.

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Keep going!

Agrisea is turning common algae and seaweeds into natural fertilisers, drinks and even solutions to dirty rivers (Image: Agrisea)

PodcastsSeptember 19, 2022

From fertilisers to soft drinks: The wonderful world of algae innovation

Simon Pound

Business is Boring host

Agrisea is turning common algae and seaweeds into natural fertilisers, drinks and even solutions to dirty rivers (Image: Agrisea)

Paeroa company AgriSea is using algae to pioneer solutions to everything from polluted waterways to chemical-heavy fertilisers.

New Zealand’s flora are known for their many healing properties – from mānuka to kawakawa, kōwhai to horopito. But one variety of flora that is found all over our country may not have been given as much credit as it deserves: algae.

There are thousands of varieties of algae, all with different applications and qualities that we’re only just starting to explore. Paeroa-based company AgriSea has made a name for themselves as leaders in the exploration of seaweed’s many qualities.

They’re pioneering solutions to dirty rivers, methane outputs of cattle, traditional fertilisers, nano cellulose technologies and even soft drinks. With 25 years of innovation under their belt, this multigenerational company is still going from strength to strength, winning Māori company of the year at the 2022 Hi Tech Awards.

AgriSea CEO Clare Bradley and chief innovation officer Tane Bradley joined Simon Pound on Business is Boring to talk about the wonders of this often underrated plant.

On Business is Boring, the award-winning weekly podcast series brought to you by The Spinoff and Spark Lab, host Simon Pound talks to everyone from accidental entrepreneurs to industry leaders about their business journeys and what propelled them to where they are today.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

Simon Pound: How did AgriSea begin?

Tane Bradley: Mum and my stepfather, Keith, went away down to the Hawke’s Bay. They were wwoofing, which is when you work on organic farms and trade that off for boarding and food. It was on one of these farms that they noticed an absolute difference; the farm was healthier, the animals were better, the fruit tasted better… and the farmer’s main input was seaweed.

The company began in the fertiliser space, so what do the traditional fertilisers do, and what does seaweed do better?

Clare Bradley: A lot of our soil contains really rich nutrients, and when you add seaweed it basically feeds all the bugs. The bugs’ job, just like in our stomach, is to access nutrients and make them available in a form that the plant can utilise really quickly. So it’s kind of like either feeding fast food versus feeding really nutritious probiotic formulas to grow.

So over 25 years, the company has built itself to where it is now, how did the founders get that momentum? Because I imagine turning up to farmers 25 years ago saying “hey, here’s some seaweed” probably was a bit of a long sales conversation.

Tane: What was respected out there was the sheer grit and determination that both mum and Keith had, and continually going up to the gates and educating farmers on how working together can be beneficial for the farm and the animals.

Clare: Originally, it was for home gardeners… Once we began selling product to people for whom the land is their living, that started another phase completely for the company – about research and development, testing, and trialling, what these products can do on monoculture commercial growing systems.

Kiwifruit was the first industry we researched really heavily, and found results like increased fruit size and quality. It’s really important for us to make sure that the products we’re selling add value, and are backed by research and science.

It makes so much sense that the fruit is going to taste better if it comes from healthier, more abundant ecosystems than thin monocrops where you kill everything that isn’t what you need.

Clare: Across the world, research into the use of seaweed has quadrupled in the last 10 years. So our collective wisdom is growing. We’re not the weird hippies in the corner anymore, we’re getting invited to the parties and we’re making friends, and scientists and researchers are saying there is something here in these low concentrations that can really add value.

You started very much in that bionutrient space with fertiliser replacement, but today there’s so many areas of innovation – what are the main things you’re working on, and what kind of relationship do you have with the whenua and the moana around that?

Tane: We have coastal harvesters all around the country that pick up after storms, and high waves and winds. They go out there and hand-gather, which is absolutely brilliant and our most preferred way of getting seaweed to Paeroa.

We are also now working on growing it in the sea, working with green wave technology from the States and applying that to our pre-existing mussel lines. We’re trying to see how we can polyculture them both and benefit the environment at the same time.

Another exciting project we’re just about to hit the switches on is growing seaweed on land… We brought some technology over from Australia and reimagined it to suit our conditions here in New Zealand, so essentially what we’re doing is bringing in seawater, using a different type of seaweed to take out the excess nitrogen and phosphorus, and then we send the cleaner water back out to the ocean.

That’s never been done before and in 12 months time, once we have some really neat data sets, I can imagine hectares and hectares of these systems helping to clean up our waterways.