Mō mātou · About
Why did I do this?
What’s it for?
Love You, Bye is what you say to someone you’ll see again.
That is the entire idea applied to materials.
We treat waste as a goodbye. Toss it, forget it, gone. But we don’t live in a single-use world. The bottle, the can, the cardboard box: these are materials on a round trip, not a one-way ticket. LYB asks people to send their materials off with a little heart, the way you’d farewell a friend, because in a working circular system you genuinely will see them again.
It’s whimsical. That’s deliberate. Waste is mundane and overlooked, and mundane things don’t change behaviour. A strange, warm, memorable idea does. If the symbols make you smile, you notice them. If you notice them, you learn them. If you learn them, sorting stops being a chore and starts being a habit with meaning attached.
For behaviour change to stick faster, the tools have to be wanted. A shared set of design and language assets that people actually choose to put in their workplaces, their homes, on their bins and around their cities. Adoption through desire, not mandate.
When LYB began, New Zealand had no unified system of icons, colours or language for waste. Sixty-seven councils, sixty-seven dialects. Policy change has since brought partial standardisation, but the gap remains: our waste systems are not segmented anywhere near finely enough, and the visual language has not kept pace.
Closing the loop means teaching people the life cycle of every material they touch. That takes a design language granular enough to be accurate and beautiful enough to be wanted. Companies will print it on packaging. Councils will put it on bins. People will learn it without noticing they are learning.
The current symbols fail this test. They are drab, joyless and forgettable. Nobody wants them on their product, their bin or their street. A system people are proud to display is not decoration. It is the mechanism.
The reframe
“If you think about [plastic] like an ancestor, then maybe you can start to think about treating it with respect instead of throwing it in the ocean.”
George Nuku (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) · Bottled Ocean, 2022
So I made a unified recycling system.
97
marks
2
languages
1
standard
And I wrapped it in an idea — that recycling is a love language.
Morg
01 — The problem
Standardised materials, fragmented communication.
In February 2024, Aotearoa standardised what can be recycled at kerbside: plastics 1, 2, and 5; glass bottles and jars; paper and cardboard; aluminium and steel cans; aerosol cans. The list is the same in every district that offers a kerbside service.
The signage is not. Sixty-seven territorial authorities operate their own waste services, each with its own bin colours, iconography, wayfinding, websites, and tone. People move between districts and encounter different visual languages for identical rules. Manufacturers print packaging that must work under all of them. Contamination rates reflect the confusion — around 12 per cent of Auckland kerbside recycling arrives too soiled or misallocated to process.
02 — The intervention
One visual language. Aligned to the kerbside standard.
Love You Bye is a unified design system: colours, typography, ninety-seven sorting marks, signage templates, and web components. The mark set is aligned with the NZ Plastics Identification Code, the 2024 kerbside materials list, and WasteMINZ standardisation guidance.
It is free to adopt. Councils can replace their bespoke wayfinding without a procurement process. Manufacturers can print a single on-pack mark that tells a shopper in Kaitāia or Invercargill whether the packaging is kerbside-recyclable in Aotearoa.
The system is open source under a permissive license. No membership, no licensing fee, no gatekeeper. Source files, taxonomy, and code are published in full.
03 — The ambition
Universal adoption across Aotearoa.
The goal is quiet ubiquity: every bin, every product, every council website using the same marks and the same language. Standardised materials deserve standardised signage. When a shopper can read packaging the same way they read a road sign, contamination falls and recovery rates climb.
Love You Bye is designed to be handed over. The intended governance path is stewardship by a national body — the Ministry for the Environment, WasteMINZ, or a successor to the Waste Minimisation Act framework — with the project remaining openly licensed in perpetuity.
Materials have value. Say goodbye properly.
By the numbers
Why a national standard is worth the effort.
781kg
waste per person per year
OECD, 2023
4th
worst in the OECD
Global Waste Index, 2025
~35%
of waste recycled or reused
Ministry for the Environment
~12%
kerbside contamination (Auckland)
Auckland Council
50%
of landfill is construction waste
Ministry for the Environment
8
councils with no kerbside collection
WasteMINZ
Full sources on the State of Waste report.
Provenance and sources
The mark set
The ninety-seven sorting marks are adapted from the Norwegian Sorteringsmerker — the open-source pack developed by LOOP Miljøskole and Grønt Punkt Norge that standardised on-pack and on-bin waste marks across Norway. Artwork has been reworked to Aotearoa kerbside categories, NZ Plastics Identification Codes, and local material streams. Provenance is retained in the taxonomy.
Standards alignment
- Ministry for the Environment — Kerbside Standardisation (Feb 2024)
- WasteMINZ — Aotearoa Standardisation Guidelines
- Te Rautaki Para — NZ Waste Strategy 2023
- NZ Plastics Identification Code
- WCAG 2.2 AA for all digital components
Who built it
An independent design initiative, researched against public data from the Ministry for the Environment, Local Government NZ, WasteMINZ, Auckland Council, and the OECD Environmental Performance Reviews. Built in public.
Governance
Love You Bye is positioned for handover to a national steward. Until then, the system is maintained in the open, decisions are published, and any council, ministry, or manufacturer may use, fork, or contribute. See the State of Waste report for the underlying data.
Open source
Code, design files, and taxonomy data are published in full. If your council, agency, or organisation wants to adopt the system, you already can — no permission required.