Toast Martinborough 2025 Waste Management Case Study | 99% Diversion
How Toast Martinborough Achieved 99% Waste Diversion Across a Multi-Site Wine Festival
Delivering a near-zero waste outcome across six vineyard sites through compostable packaging, reuse systems, and on-site resource recovery.
Location: Martinborough, New Zealand
Event type: Wine festival
Event duration: 1 day
Toast Martinborough is one of New Zealand’s most established wine festivals, spanning six vineyard sites and attracting thousands of attendees each year.
With a distributed site layout, multiple vendors, and high volumes of food and beverage consumption, managing waste across the event requires a highly coordinated system.
Nonstop Solutions partnered with Toast Martinborough to design and deliver a waste minimisation system focused on composting, reuse, and high-accuracy recovery.
Key outcomes:
99.05% resource recovery rate
4,687 kg of waste managed
17,520 single-use items avoided through reuse
17 vendors aligned to compostable packaging standards
Toast Martinborough exceeded its already ambitious 99% diversion target, setting a new benchmark for waste management at multi-site events.
Delivering consistent waste outcomes across multiple vineyard sites introduces a different level of complexity compared to a single-site event.
Key challenges included:
Managing waste across six separate locations
Coordinating vendors across distributed sites
Maintaining consistency in packaging and sorting systems
Transporting and consolidating waste for sorting
Ensuring high compliance without centralised infrastructure
The system needed to function seamlessly across all locations while maintaining extremely high diversion targets.
The System We Implemented
Compost-First Packaging System
All vendors were required to use approved compostable packaging, supported by BioPak.
Nonstop worked closely with vendors in the lead-up to the event, providing:
packaging guidance and alternatives
vendor workshops
direct support to ensure compliance
This significantly reduced landfill before the event even began.
Reuse Systems
Toast Martinborough integrated reuse into key parts of the event experience:
reusable wine glasses for attendees
water refill stations across all sites
reusable signage and infrastructure
This resulted in:
17,520 single-use items avoided
approximately 438 kg of waste prevented
Reuse played a critical role in reducing overall material demand.
Distributed Resource Recovery System
Each site was equipped with resource recovery stations separating:
compost
recycling
landfill
Back-of-house systems ensured vendors could correctly separate waste before collection.
Nonstop teams managed waste across all sites, transporting materials to on-site hubs for sorting.
On-Site Sorting & Auditing
All waste was hand-sorted into more than 16 material streams, allowing for:
high diversion accuracy
detailed waste auditing
identification of contamination sources
This level of sorting is key to achieving recovery rates above 95%.
Industry Collaboration
Toast Martinborough’s results were achieved through close collaboration between event organisers, vendors, and key partners across the waste system.
A core part of this approach was the use of certified compostable packaging, supported by BioPak. These materials enabled a consistent, compost-first system across all vendors, helping reduce contamination and improve recovery outcomes.
This was complemented by downstream processing and collection partners, ensuring materials were handled correctly beyond the event site.
For a partner perspective on the packaging systems used, see BioPak’s case study:
→ View BioPak case study
Key Findings
Waste Diversion
Toast Martinborough achieved a 99.05% resource recovery rate, with only a minimal proportion of waste sent to landfill.
This represents one of the highest diversion rates achieved at a New Zealand event.
From 93% to over 99% in three years, Toast Martinborough demonstrates what’s possible when waste systems are continuously refined. The result is not a one-off success, but a repeatable, system-led approach to high-performance event waste management.
These results have also been recognised externally, with regional media describing Toast Martinborough as achieving a “near perfect waste recovery scorecard.”
Waste Outcomes by System
Waste was managed across composting, recycling, reuse, and landfill systems.
Reuse (avoided): 438 kg
Compost & organics: 506 kg
Recycling: 4,078 kg
Landfill: 48.6 kg
These outcomes reflect a system designed to eliminate landfill wherever possible, supported by strong vendor compliance and detailed sorting processes.
Reuse is measured as the estimated weight of single-use items avoided.
A large proportion of recovered material was glass, which made up over 80% of total material by weight.
While this significantly contributes to overall recovery rates, it also highlights the importance of looking beyond weight-based metrics.
Excluding glass, the event still achieved a recovery rate of approximately 94.5%, demonstrating strong performance across other material streams.
Attendee & Vendor Engagement
Vendor participation was critical to the success of the system.
All vendors committed to compostable packaging and actively supported waste separation throughout the event.
Attendees engaged well with the system, supported by:
clear bin signage
consistent packaging across vendors
accessible bin placement
This alignment across vendors, organisers, and attendees enabled high recovery outcomes.
Looking Ahead
While Toast Martinborough has achieved exceptional results, further opportunities exist to reduce waste at the source.
Future improvements include:
introducing reusable serviceware for all food vendors
reducing remaining back-of-house landfill items
expanding reuse systems across the event
With reuse expansion, Toast has the potential to move even closer toward a fully circular event model.
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