The People
The Guardians
Sustainability measures have become part of the WineWorks culture, says Anthony Barnes, in a series celebrating Sustainability Guardians. SOPHIE PREECE MAKING SUSTAINABILITY sim-
ple has been key to the success of WineWorks’ plummeting waste-line. “It really is about changing the way people think and building a habit,” says the company’s Project Manager, Anthony Barnes. “You have to make it easy for people to do the right thing.” The Marlborough-based wine bottling and warehousing company has doubled its case numbers since 2015, but reduced its waste to landfill by nearly 10 percent over the same period. Ninety percent of its waste, by volume, is now captured for reuse or recycling, and suppliers are increasingly vetted for sustainable products and packaging, says Anthony, who is far from satisfied by their success. “I am not happy with the level we are at,” he says. “If one piece goes into the landfill skip that doesn’t need to, I will pick it up and give everyone a rark up for it.”
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WineWorks has now signed up with Toitū Envirocare, and has undertaken an initial first audit under the scheme’s carbonreduce programme. They have “some fairly lofty goals” planned, says Anthony. “We are certainly not taking an easydoes-it approach.” The company plans to be carbon neutral by 2030, and he expects it to be zero waste in the same timeframe. Anthony and his wife Beth left Auckland’s “rat race” in 2008 to move to Marlborough, where he had first lived 14 years earlier, straight out of high school and learning his logistics trade while serving in the Air Force at Woodbourne. In the eight years between leaving Blenheim and returning to become WineWorks’ Warehouse and Distribution Manager, the expansion of New Zealand’s wine industry had been “pretty staggering” he says. “It wasn’t quite the
NZ WINEGROWER DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
wild west, but it was certainly a very young wine industry in dynamic phases of growth, for good or for bad.” The industry was scrambling to keep up with expansion, but in the years since, he has witnessed it move from that “youthful” position to being an established sector, with a lot of experience, skill and understanding in the ranks. That’s come with a change of mindset, he says, noting that a decade ago people would be employed for a logistics roles because they could tell a Sauvignon from a Chardonnay grape, rather than the professional knowledge they really needed. Now there’s a similar evolution happening around sustainability, in wine and other industries, as they better understand the opportunities to work in a more efficient and environmentally conscious way, Anthony says. “It’s exciting to think that we will be past those
growing pains soon.” In 2012, Anthony became Supply Chain Development Manager at WineWorks, then moved into the Project Manager role, focussing on infrastructure development, while looking after the company’s sustainability programmes, a l o n g s i d e W i n e Wo r k s ’ Auckland-based Operations Improvement Manager Gowan Robertson, “as well as the wider team”. He’s seen a maturing outlook in the wine industry on many levels, including logistics, over the past 10 years, “and I believe that is what we now need to see happen around sustainability”. A more sustainable focus is simply part of the company culture now, says WineWorks Director Tim Nowell-Usticke, a member of the New Zealand Winegrowers’ Board. “It is not an addition to what we do. It is how we do things.” Building habits starts with