Trash to Treasure

Repost going ‘gangbusters’ 

SOPHIE PREECE 

A NEW Repost ‘hub’ in Spring Creek will enable more Marlborough grapegrowers to divert their broken vineyard posts from stockpiles and landfill, to instead be repurposed into low-cost fencing posts. 

Repost, which won the Wine Marlborough-sponsored wine industry award at the 2023 Cawthron Marlborough Environment Awards, and the innovation award at the 2023 Beef + Lamb New Zealand Awards, is going “gangbusters”, says co-owner Dansy Coppell. “I am so proud of where Repost is going and what we have achieved in such a short period of time.” The success of the company has been thanks to great timing, with wine companies concerned about waste streams and circularity, farmers dealing with fencing obligations, and councils working to reduce waste streams. 

Wooden vineyard posts are treated with copper chrome arsenate, so cannot be burned, With around 375,000 posts broken in Marlborough each year, that has traditionally meant unwanted stockpiles on vineyards or unwanted drop-offs at landfill, with just a small number of the waste posts diverted for reuse in gardens and on farms. 

In 2020 Dansy and her husband Greg, who are Saint Arnaud sheep and beef farmers, joined forces with Marlborough viticulturist Stu Dudley, to come up with a method of repurposing the posts for farm fencing. That meant a lot of hustling in the early days, convincing people to let the team come onto their vineyard and work through the posts in situ, says Dansy. “Now people say, ‘we really believe in what you are doing’”. 

Having wine industry heavy weights like Villa Maria and Yealands jump into the initiative in the early days made a huge difference, and they were eventually followed by myriad other companies keen to reduce their post stockpiles or avoid the landfill, she says. That means Repost is now fully booked up, with a backlog of post piles to get to. 

Having the new hub at Spring Creek, and a secondary site to be confirmed, means smaller operators, and those who cannot have the work done on their vineyard or winery site, can now drop the posts off, Dansy says. The hub supplies will help Repost meet the “exponential” growth in demand from farming customers since the Beef + Lamb Awards, she adds. “It’s been an exciting year of growth.” 

Farmers around the country are struggling with the fencing obligations in wetland and freshwater protection requirements, exacerbated for some by the devastating impact of Cyclone Gabrielle, which led Repost to expand into Hawke’s Bay last year. “A lot of them don’t have the budget and capacity to do the fencing,” Dansy says. “This product costs half the price, so for them it’s a no brainer.” 

Marlborough District Council Solid Waste Manager Mark Lucas also calls it a no brainer for wine companies, which pay Repost approximately 80% of the cost of landfill dumping. Repost is a better environmental choice, extending the life of the resource, but also extends the life of the landfill, because the posts take up so much space, he says. “We would like 100% of posts to be diverted elsewhere.”