Toast Martinborough: The Journey Toward a Zero Waste Food and Wine Event

Toast Martinborough is one of New Zealand’s most esteemed food and wine festivals. In 2023, 6,289 people gathered across eight different sites for a blissful day out amongst the vines. They sampled delicious food and wine and let their hair down on the dancefloor. 

Excitingly, Toast Martinborough also prioritises environmental stewardship, showing that a greener and more responsible approach to waste management at festivals isn’t only possible, but incredibly viable. 

By partnering with Nonstop Solutions, BioPak, and Compost Connect, the 2023 Toast Martinborough festival achieved a 93.6% resource recovery rate.

Toast Martinborough recognised food packaging as one of the biggest contributors to event waste. 

With that, they started to look at ways they could reduce the amount of waste going to landfill, and instead opt for compostable or reusable solutions.

Toast Martinborough aims to offer a renowned food and wine festival, while minimising their overall environmental impact. 

In the short term, they’re looking to minimise waste and divert all compostable and organic matter to commercial compost facilities.

In the long term, they strive to become a completely circular event with reusable vessels for all food and drinks.

In 2023, Toast Martinborough partnered with Nonstop Solutions – a New Zealand based team of sustainability experts who work with events and businesses to implement zero waste systems.

To help achieve their zero waste target, Nonstop Solutions called upon leaders in the sustainability space – BioPak and Compost Connect.

At the 2023 festival, BioPak supplied all foodservice packaging to vendors. 

We supplied the event’s vendors with a variety of packaging in the below categories:

• Plant Fibre Takeaway Containers
• Napkins and FSCTM Certified Wooden Cutlery 
• Plates and Bowls
• BioBoard Trays

At BioPak, our packaging is made from responsibly sourced, rapidly renewable plant-based resources – designed to be composted at the end of its life. 

We see compostable packaging as the ideal choice for the foodservice industry. Food scraps and packaging can all go in one bin, the organic bin, to be composted at home or industrially.

All the foodservice packaging supplied was certified home compostable (AS5810) or industrially compostable (AS4736) to Australian and New Zealand Standards. To gain these certifications, packaging has to undergo strict, expensive and rigorous test regimes to prove compostability. 

This enabled us to collect all food and packaging waste from the event and turn it into nutrient-rich compost.

Toast Martinborough partnered with Compost Connect to dispose of BioPak’s compostable packaging and complete the circle. 

Compost Connect is a not-for-profit composting initiative connecting businesses and events to commercial organic waste pickup services. This helps divert food waste from landfills and create nutrient-rich compost instead. 

Together, Nonstop Solutions and Compost Connect implemented several measures to ensure the correct disposal. 

This included:

• Accessibility: creating several resource recovery stations – 3 - 6 stations on each site with a total of 35 across the entire event.
• Clear signage: there were 214 bins across the event, with clear signage to educate patrons on the correct disposal methods. 
• Hand sorting: each bag was brought back to the HQ and hand sorted into nine different categories. The majority of waste was sorted quickly and efficiently on the same day.
• Education:The Nonstop Solutions team were also present at the event to help implement the zero waste system or strike up a conversation about sustainability.
• Tracking: great tracking and reporting to see the impact and make way for continuous improvements.

Across the entire event, Toast Martinborough achieved a 93.6% resource recovery and reduction rate – a wonderful result given the size and complexity of the event. 

When we break it down further, there was a 72.9% recovery rate from attendees and a 96.4% recovery rate from vendors. The event avoided 27,655 single-serve vessels thanks to the introduction of reusables. 

With time and further education at future events, we hope to see these impressive figures increase even more.

Toast of Martinborough proves that large-scale events can seamlessly combine food, wine, music and environmental responsibility. 

Nonstop Solutions uses events as closed bubbles to provide examples of how these systems can work in our everyday lives. So this doesn’t just provide a shining example for the industry – but the world at large.