Iconic Kiwi beer brand, Export has unveiled a new look with more environmentally-friendly bottles and packaging that build on its history as New Zealand’s most sustainable beer. The beer that brought you Brewtroleum and Beer Bottle Sand has taken its commitment to innovation up a level by ensuring its packaging is as sustainable as its bold initiatives. This change will see Export swap from plastic to paper labels and shift to locally supplied carton board boxes in a move that will make its packaging 100% recyclable and will decrease the brand’s total carbon emissions. The reduction is significant - the equivalent of approximately 600 return flights from Auckland to Queenstown per year.
Moving to paper labels means a whopping 45,275 kg of plastic will no longer be going to landfill each year, equivalent to the weight of approximately 16 Toyota Hilux Utes. The changes also mean that 11,881 kgs of ink will be saved a year, plus moving the supply of paper for carton board boxes to a local supplier will save thousands of kilometres in travel and result in a significant carbon emission reduction.
On the shelves Kiwi beer drinkers will see a new streamlined modern carton board design that will make finding any of the brand’s products easy, and with a striking new logo featuring a stylised ‘X’ for instant recognition. Export has long been known as New Zealand’s leading sustainable beer having created globally recognised initiatives such as Brewtroleum, where the brewer created a biofuel from ethanol left over in the brewing process, and Beer Bottle Sand where the brewer recycled glass bottles back into sand and built reverse vending machines for bars that crushed bottles into sand instantly. The new-look Export signals the brand’s ongoing commitment to sustainability and making New Zealand an even better place to enjoy a beer.
Peter Simons, Managing Director at DB Breweries, says: “To the individual, these may seem like simple changes to the bottles and packs, but considering Export is the third largest beer brand in New Zealand and represents 1 in every 10 litres of beer sold, the environmental benefits of this move are significant.”
“Export is a proud Kiwi brand that is committed to making New Zealand an even better place to enjoy a beer, and that means helping to tackle today’s refuse problems and those of the future. Aligned with the draft advice of the Climate Change Commission, we believe that, as a brewer, we need to make meaningful change in our value chain to actively reduce our carbon footprint by taking real action and not just buying carbon offsets. As a company DB has set an ambitious goal to halve our carbon footprint by 2030 (from a 2018 baseline) and move to 100% renewable energy sources for our breweries by 2030. This has started already in 2021 by switching from coal to renewable biomass at our brewery in Timaru and Export’s commitment and changes are another important step towards this goal,” says Simons.
Consumers can expect to see the new Export bottles and packs on shelves now.
