01 — The mark

Recycling is a love language.

Every material goes somewhere, there is no “away.” Let’s standardise our icons, our colours and our behaviours to treat the materials we use with love. So less goes to waste, less goes wasted and more gets used again. Because when you’ve finished with a material, the Earth hasn’t.

Love You, Bye

Aotearoa materials design system

Est. 2026 · Open source

Glass PackagingKarāhe Takai

Rinse, lid off, into the glass crate.

Love You, Byeloveyoubye.nz

The language

02 — In use

The same , the length of the country.

781kg

of materials per person, per year. Fourth-worst in the OECD.

Source — OECD, 2023 · Aotearoa standardised what can be recycled, then let every council communicate it differently. Sixty-seven goodbyes for the same materials.

~35%

of waste recycled or reused

Ministry for the Environment

~12%

of Auckland kerbside recycling arrives too contaminated to process

Auckland Council

50%

of landfill is construction waste

Ministry for the Environment

councils with no kerbside collection at all

WasteMINZ

03 — Go deeper · rapua te hōhonu

Three bins is a start. Ninety-seven materials is a language.

A bottle, a battery and a broken toaster are not the same goodbye. Most kerbside systems flatten everything into a few streams — and whatever the streams can’t name ends up in the wrong one. The finer the sorting, the more comes back. Norway has sorted at this depth across 356 municipalities since 2017. Aotearoa can too — the language is already here.

Where we are

RecyclingHangarua

Food scrapsPara kai

RubbishPara

Three goodbyes. Everything else guesses.

Where we can go