Most of us think about what goes into making wine. Very few of us think about what comes out.

Behind the scenes, every winery is managing significant waste streams — grape skins, fermentation lees, and large volumes of water used to clean tanks and equipment throughout the process. For years, this wastewater was one of the wine industry's less glamorous challenges. At Rose Family Estate in Marlborough, that has changed.

In this episode of Progress in Practice, host Nick Morrison sits down with Nick Entwistle, Chief Winemaker at Rose Family Estate, for a fascinating conversation about water, waste, and what it means to genuinely commit to sustainability in a primary industry business. Rose Family Estate is home to the globally renowned Wairau River Wines. The business is proudly family-owned, with 15 vineyards covering around 500 hectares. Phil and Chris Rose have been farming this land since 1978 — and the third generation is now entering the business. This is intergenerational thinking in action. Nick Entwistle has been with the Rose family for 17 years. He is the kind of Chief Winemaker who gets genuinely excited about fermenting things — including, as it turns out, the microbes in a wastewater bioreactor.

In this episode, Nick M and Nick E cover:

• Why winemaking generates significant wastewater and what's actually in it
• The difference between the old system and the new return activated sludge (RAS) system — and why it's a game-changer during vintage peaks of 120,000 litres per day
• The $1.5 million investment, the green loan from ANZ, and what the payback picture looks like over a 40 to 50 year horizon
• How the wastewater plant became a hub for wider sustainability initiatives across the estate
• The green spreading of grape marc returning 4.5 tonnes of potassium to their soils last year — nutrients that would otherwise have been imported as synthetic fertiliser
• The Marlborough Circular Wine Group and the BRAGATO project targeting diversion of 6,000 tonnes of winery waste from landfill every year
• Native plantings across the estate — and how they once saved a vineyard from slipping into the river after the Kaikōura earthquake

What makes this conversation special is the scope of it. This is not a single initiative — it is an entire philosophy of land stewardship, expressed through practical action at every level of the business.

For more on Rose Family Estate and Wairau River Wines, visit the links below. https://rosefamilyestate.com/pages/sustainability

For more on Go Well Consulting, visit the Go Well Consulting website via the link below. https://gowellconsulting.co.nz

What does a circular economy actually look like in practice for a children's clothing brand?

Not in theory. Not in a strategy document. But in the messy, energising, sometimes frustrating reality of running a retail brand — managing teams, navigating logistics, and trying to change the way your customers think and behave?

That's the question at the heart of this episode, and Jacob Faull answers it with remarkable honesty.

Jacob is the co-founder of Nature Baby, a New Zealand-born children's clothing label he started with his wife Georgia about 25 years ago — born out of frustration at not being able to find organic, natural clothing for their first child. Today, Nature Baby operates stores in Auckland, Wellington, and Sydney, works with over 80 stockists across Australia and the United States, and manufactures its garments using certified organic cotton from India and ZQ-certified merino from Australasia. It's a brand built slowly, deliberately, and with genuine care — and it shows.

The initiative at the centre of this conversation is Worn Again — Nature Baby's circular takeback program. Customers return their pre-loved Nature Baby garments in exchange for store credit. Those items are assessed, cleaned, and sent back out into the world: resold, donated, repaired, or recycled, depending on their condition. Simple in concept. Genuinely hard in practice.

Jacob walks us through all of it — the lightbulb moment that came from hearing a single garment had been worn by eight different children, the surprising fibre science behind why Nature Baby products last so much longer than typical children's clothing, and the very human challenge of asking customers to change habits they've had their whole lives.

He's refreshingly candid about the numbers. Their current return rate sits at around 1.5% — lower than the 8% benchmark they were aiming for, and a long way from the 12% Jacob had hoped for. But 90% of what does come back goes straight to resale. And each month, slowly, the numbers grow.

In this episode, Nick and Jacob cover:

• Why Nature Baby's organic fibres make their garments uniquely suited to multiple lives
• The full circular hierarchy: resale first, then donation, repair, and recycling as a last resort
• What it actually took to get the whole team — product, merchandise, retail, marketing, digital — aligned and energised around a program that adds real workload
• Why inspiring customers to participate is just as hard as solving the logistics
• What Worn Again content does to their social media engagement — and the interesting gap between what people like and what they buy
• The plan to launch online returns and scale the program beyond the in-store experience
• Jacob's long-term vision: a fully pre-loved, standalone Nature Baby community store

What makes this conversation genuinely worth your time isn't just the initiative itself — it's the way Jacob talks about it.

For anyone thinking about what circular economy could actually mean for their own business — or anyone who just wants to hear from someone doing something that matters and doing it with integrity — this one's for you.

To find out more about Nature Baby and the Worn Again program, visit https://www.naturebaby.co.nz/pages/worn-again.

To learn more about Go Well Consulting and how we work with businesses on sustainability strategy and reporting, visit https://gowellconsulting.co.nz/.

Every year, thousands of square metres of flooring are ripped up from offices, hospitals, schools and commercial buildings across New Zealand — and the vast majority of it ends up in landfill. It's a quiet but significant waste problem that most people in the construction and fitout industry simply accept as the cost of doing business.

Jacobsen didn't accept it.

In this episode of Progress in Practice, host Nick Morrison speaks with Cynthia Tang, General Manager of Marketing, Technology and Impact at Jacobsen, about Re.form — the company's product stewardship and takeback program that has been running since 2020. Re.form collects discarded vinyl, carpet tile and rubber flooring from Jacobsen customers and sends it back through the supply chain to manufacturing and recycling partners in Europe, where it is processed back into new flooring products. It is a genuine closed loop recycling solution — and one of the most ambitious sustainability initiatives being run by a New Zealand flooring business today.

But the story of Re.form is not just about what the program does. It's about what it took to build it.

Over six years, Cynthia and the Jacobsen team have navigated a remarkable set of obstacles: convincing architects, specifiers and flooring contractors to change their on-site habits; discovering that PVC vinyl is classified as hazardous waste under export regulations, making it illegal to ship overseas in its flooring form; spending nine months searching for a granulating partner who could process the PVC into raw material pellets before export; applying for Auckland City Council waste minimisation funding to purchase their own granulator; and then, just as that funding was approved, being approached by an unexpected granulating partner who changed the plan entirely.

The entire business rallied around a program that, by Cynthia's own admission, was never designed to be a money-making or customer acquisition tool — just the responsible thing to do.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• What Re.form is and how the closed loop flooring recycling system works
• The supply chain partners behind the program — Tarkett and Shaw Contract — and their global recycling infrastructure
• The role of architects, specifiers and flooring contractors in making product stewardship programs succeed
• How the Green Star framework and shifting client expectations are driving greater demand for end-of-life flooring solutions
• The hazardous waste export regulation challenge that nearly stopped the program in its tracks
• The nine-month search for a PVC granulating partner — and the unexpected resolution
• The real-world logistics of running a takeback program: sorting days, bag management, freight efficiency and quality control
• How Jacobsen prioritises reuse before recycling, including partnerships with Habitat for Humanity and projects like the Auckland Airport temporary terminal
• The science and challenge of closed loop recycling — including a visit to Tarkett's R&D facility in Sweden
• Advice for other New Zealand and Australian businesses looking to launch their own takeback or product stewardship programs

Re.form is proof that sustainability leadership in business is rarely a straight line. It takes resilience, creativity, whole-of-business commitment.

To find out more about Jacobsen and the Re.form program, check it out here.

To learn more about Go Well Consulting and how we work with businesses on sustainability strategy and reporting, visit our website.