[As published in March/April BayBuzz magazine.]
The latest recipient of the coveted Sustainable Business Network national award for Transformational Leadership is Hawke’s Bay’s own Adele Rose. She speaks to BayBuzz about a career dedicated to pioneering product stewardship – and living on the land she loves.
A CV littered with typos doesn’t usually foreshadow a CEO in waiting.
But for Adele Rose, who began her 18-year career at 3R in a PA role and quickly ended up leading the Hastings-based business to national acclaim, it somehow did the trick.
“I saw the role advertised just as it was about to close and gave the recruitment company very strict instructions not to give them my draft CV yet as I knew it was riddled with errors,” Adele begins. “They sent it over anyway and when I went to my interview, I thought there would be no way the founders Bruce (Emerson) and Graeme (Norton) would want someone who couldn’t even get that right!”
But stepping outside after the meeting, her phone soon rang with the news – she had the job.
Unconventional, humble, and beguiling – all are words that could apply to Adele, who accepted her award in Auckland in November with treasured grandson James at her side. “I’d already committed to babysitting him so his mother could go to the Metallica concert at Eden Park. It was lovely to have him with me.”
The award was fitting recognition of Adele’s role in revolutionising how New Zealand handles waste through pioneering product stewardship schemes – everything from the way we take our paint to be safely disposed of at Resene through to the stewardship fee we pay for tyre recycling through Tyrewise.
These systems – co-designed by Adele and her team at 3R – mean Aotearoa’s precious land, water and resources are better protected, and our planetary health supported.
It might seem a slightly unconventional path to those who don’t know Adele and her tenacity – she left school with modest marks and little idea of what might come next. “I still don’t have any formal qualifications,” she admits, “but I’ve always been lucky to be surrounded by innovative people, who are committed to the environment in some way.”
Curiosity and a natural affinity for working alongside engineers and scientists in companies with strong research and development programmes saw Adele take a job with a company that developed triple cyclonic gasifiers.
It was a steep learning curve within a cutting-edge business that worked from an organic kiwifruit orchard in Haumoana. “We were developing waste-to-energy solutions that achieved zero emissions from woody waste combustion. With the gasifier working away creating useful heat energy, you could measure emissions from the stack and there were none – everything burned away into nothing.”
During her time working with gasifiers and exploring municipal waste trials, Adele first met Graeme and Bruce, the original founders of what would later become 3R Group. Then came the incomplete CV, that interview, and a rapid rise from personal assistant, to general manager, then chief executive, as 3R experienced rapid growth.
When Adele started, 3R Group had just six staff split between the office and their Auckland site, with product stewardship R&D conducted from a small shed behind their Queen Street premises, and paint and packaging recycling was their bread and butte
“We had a truck that had on-site processing in it for paint,” Adele explains of the Resene Paintwise™ scheme, which is now over 20 years old. “We would move the truck around, set up in the retailer’s car park, process paint, then move to the next site.”
At first, it seemed efficient to work this way, but the popularity of the scheme brought challenges. The noise from the diesel engine running the mobile processing unit created issues with neighbouring businesses, forcing the company to centralise operations across three permanent sites in Auckland, Christchurch and Hastings.
Following close on the heels of paint and packaging stewardship came the Agrecovery Rural Recycling scheme, which took away unused and unwanted agricultural chemicals and packaging, and then Tyrewise – New Zealand’s first regulated product stewardship programme, which has just marked its first birthday.
With the equivalent of 4.6 million end-of-life passenger tyres already collected and diverted from landfill or illegal dumping, the scheme is already being hailed as a major success. The rubber from the tyres is recycled into materials used in – for example – playground surfaces, glues and roading, or it’s exported to approved offshore markets.
Adele is particularly thrilled to have seen divergent groups across the tyre sector come together to implement the initiative. “We have over 4,500 registered partners, including importers and retailers, and 86 public collection sites in 13 regions. And it’s growing.”
Today, 3R Group operates as what Adele describes as a “trusted third party” between government, brands, and consumers in developing a range of product stewardship schemes. But her personal values mean that 3R won’t work with just anyone – and that extends to suppliers. Adele recalls terminating a contract when one supplier began to “courier really fancy chocolate cakes to customers all over New Zealand” without considering the environmental impact, which didn’t align with 3R’s values.
At home, those values are lived in real time. On a block of land in Ashley Clinton, Adele and her family are slowly restoring their property, with the aim that they’ll leave it in better shape than they found it. “We back onto a river, one of the more polluted in our region, and the first thing we did was move truckload after truckload of rubbish that had been dumped in it.
“There’s a swimming hole there now, where people couldn’t swim before – and we’ve now moved onto tackling the thistle and blackberry supported by match funding from the Tukipo Catchment Care Group for riparian planting.”
Living within a modern, multi-generational family sharing strong environmental values feels like a privilege. “James is part of our household,” says Adele of her grandson. “He’s one of the most passionate environmentalists you could meet, and so are the kids at his school. They regularly care for the nearby scenic reserve by planting trees and picking up rubbish. For them, the idea of someone littering is simply unthinkable.”
The attitude to the environment is entirely different among today’s children, she reflects. “I think that gives me a lot of hope.”
Other things to be encouraged by include 3R’s plans to continue developing product stewardship and extended producer responsibility schemes, working closely with the brands involved to co-design programmes of work. Adele is particularly keen to build out New Zealand’s first large battery recycling scheme for electric vehicles and energy storage systems – an exciting step in a rapidly evolving focus area.
“The chemistry for large batteries is changing quickly,” says Adele. “The length of time that batteries last before they need to be stewarded at end of first useful life is expanding.”
She’s also keen to see governments take into account whole-life costing in environmental decisions.
“People think that we can afford to have less focus on climate action because we’re in a particular economic state. There’s a notion that someone, somewhere down the track will pick up the ball and race quickly to the 2050 targets.
“That’s not going to happen,” concludes Adele. “Economic value will come if we can consider the long-term impact on the earth of everything we create, everything we do, and make bolder choices now.”
3r.co.nz
Fiona Fraser is the director of Contentment PR & Communications. Nominate a savvy entrepreneur to feature in an upcoming column by contacting [email protected]
