About us
Sustainability
At Trade Me, we’re committed to business sustainability and helping our members make a difference.
Trade Me helps Kiwi buy, sell and reuse over six million used items every year, reducing waste and helping the environment. Our Circular Economy report shows that 87% of Kiwi have bought something secondhand in the past six months - that’s up from 76% five years ago.
Here's what we're doing to build a more sustainable Aotearoa.
What is Trade Me doing?
In 2017, we named a real-life kiwi, Kevin, after our brand mascot, ‘Kev the kiwi’.
Supporting New Zealand wildlife
Trade Me is a proud supporter of Save the Kiwi. There's even a real Kevin the kiwi living at Rotokare Scenic Reserve in Taranaki.
Circular Economy Report
We make it easy for Kiwi 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. We publish the Circular Economy Report each year to share what New Zealanders are doing to help build a more circular economy.
Key highlights:
$1,300 could go towards a holiday, pay off some debt or contribute to some great Christmas or birthday presents. All from things that are just around your house!
Carbon reduction
We are a Carbon Neutral organisation, accredited with Oxygen Consulting. This means we have Science Based Targets to reduce carbon emissions and are committed to meeting those targets.
Green-certified office
Our Tāmaki Makaurau crew are based out of Te Kupenga, a 6 Green Star building
Te Kupenga features:
- Sensor activated LED lighting
- Efficient HVAC and thermal design
- Solar panels and rainwater catchment tanks
- EV charging and 106 bike parks
- Shared bee farm and composting
These innovations help reduce the building's energy consumption by 40% when compared with a traditional commercial building of similar size.
Office fitouts
When fitting out our offices, carbon emissions are front of mind. Where possible we use recycled materials, such as tables made from timber recovered from the Canterbury earthquakes, Clicwall (made from 100% recovered wood) and reused or repurposed carpet tiles – just to name a few. A lot of our office furniture is also sourced from Trade Me!
End of trip facilities
All of our offices have showers, bike parking and other facilities to make walking, running or biking to work that much more attractive. A great alternative to spending hours in traffic!
No fly months
As part of examining ways to reduce our carbon emissions, we have been trialling biannual 'no-fly' months to reduce the amount of carbon emissions from business travel. We have found that each ‘no-fly’ month removes 20-30 tonnes of carbon that would have been emitted from domestic air travel. We continue to look for ways to reduce our travel related carbon emissions.
Waste reduction
We've set out to minimise the waste that our offices create, and emissions generated by the products and services we use. When fitting out our offices we source preloved furniture to revamp and repurpose, rather than buying all new furniture.
We also team up with suppliers that support our sustainability goals. Our offices use Fairtrade Coffee, Fix & Fogg, Keep Cup Library, Reusabowl, Glad to be Green, Will & Able, Eco Store, Upcycle Battery.
Resource recovery
Where waste can't be avoided, we make sure it's managed responsibly and recovered for reuse where possible.
- Unused food donated to Everybody Eats
- We make recycling and composting easy with Method Recycling
- Organisations like All Heart NZ and Junk Run recover our used equipment. All Heart NZ projects divert 90% of resources from landfill
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 can leak into the environment if they're not disposed of properly..
During that time, over 200,000 Kiwi bought and sold fridges on Trade Me, extending their life and reducing the amount of toxic gases released into the atmosphere.
Thank you to all our accidental eco warriors.
By giving these fridges an extended life, Trade Me members have saved an estimated:
To put that in real terms, to remove that amount of CO2 from the environment, it would take a 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, Aotearoa!
