About us

Sustainability

At Trade Me, we’re committed to business sustainability and helping our members make a difference.

Trade Me helps Kiwis buy, sell and reuse over six million used items every year, reducing waste and helping the environment. Here are some other things we're doing, and some ideas for what you can do.

What is Trade Me doing for the environment?

  • We make it easy for Kiwis to buy and sell secondhand items. Six million used items are sold each year on Trade Me, reducing landfill waste and giving items a second life. This is good for Kiwis’ wallets and the planet.
  • We've been offsetting our carbon emissions since 2014 and are proud to be a carbon neutral business, accredited by Oxygen Consulting.
  • Supporting New Zealand wildlife. Trade Me is a proud supporter of Kiwis for kiwi. There’s even a real Kev the kiwi living at Rotokare Scenic Reserve in Taranaki.
  • We publish fuel efficiency information for new cars, so you can consider the environmental and fuel costs before you buy.

In 2017, we named a real-life kiwi, Kevin, after our brand mascot, ‘Kev the kiwi’.

Trade Me’s accidental eco warriors

There’s a good chance that if you’ve used Trade Me, that you might be an accidental eco warrior. We want to celebrate everyone making a difference against climate change.

A couple of years ago we did some digging into our data to figure out how sustainable it is to buy and sell on Trade Me. We had help from some international sustainability gurus including:

  • Laurence Bouret – CEO of the French Governments’ Product Stewardship Scheme for sharps (needles and hard to recycle stuff)
  • Jacqui Forbes (Ngāruahine) who has been involved in organisations including Xtreme Zero Waste
  • Russ Martin – Chief Executive of the Global Product Stewardship Council
  • Rae Nield –sustainability guru and lawyer
  • Darcy Hitchcock who leads the Sustainability Alliance in Arizona
  • Nic Bishop – Sustainability Catalyst, chair of the Trade Me Circular Economy Initiative.

Thank you to all our accidental eco warriors.

Saving the planet one fridge at a time

We looked at 10 years’ of data in the fridges category. Fridges contain all sorts of nasty gases in them that, if not disposed of properly when they’re no longer wanted, can leak into the environment.

In that time, more than 200,000 of our members bought and sold fridges onsite, extending the life of these items and reducing the amount of toxic gases being released into the environment.

By giving these fridges an extended life, these members saved an estimated:

  • 32,292 tonnes of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere
  • 18,000 fridges from entering landfills around the country
  • $4.2m in environmental costs.

To put that in real terms, to remove that amount of CO2 from the environment, it would take one year for a 3,754 hectare forest of mature trees to do the same. That’s roughly the size of Herne Bay, Karori and Alexandra combined.

Keep it up, New Zealand!