Sustainability Award Win For First-Ever Ecostore ‘Boat Wash’ Refillery

Marine equipment specialist Fosters Chandlery has won a Sustainability Award for their new harbourside ecostore marine refill station available at their recently opened retail store in Westhaven Marine Village, Auckland.

Like ecostore, Fosters Chandlery, owned by the Harken company, is focused on the future of our environment and proud to be offering the first in-store refillery of ecostore’s Boat Wash product to customers.

Established last year, Westhaven Marina’s ‘Best Sustainable Action of the Year’ award recognises boaties and businesses who are leading by example to protect Tāmaki Makaurau’s coastlines.

Pablo Kraus, group CEO of ecostore, says, “This is a great example of a business leading the way amongst Westhaven Marina users. Robbie Young from Harken pushed the ecostore refill project to fruition from the start, he had the vision to bring it to life in the new Fosters Chandlery store, so it’s great to see it rewarded.

“Within the marine industry, there's an increasing awareness of the health of our oceans and a growing movement to minimise the ecological impacts of onboard activity,” Kraus adds. “We're proud to support this movement by supplying environmentally responsible products to recreational marine, superyachts and cruise ships.”

Ecostore’s new Boat Wash is specifically formulated to remove salt and grime from all hard and soft surfaces – including fibreglass, vinyl, plastic, metal, wood, rubber, glass and all painted and polished surfaces.

The concentrated formula is economical to use and space-efficient to store, with 5 litres making 200 litres of Boat Wash. It’s gentle on sensitive skin, and the plant and mineral-based formulation rapidly biodegrades in marine environments, making it safer for the crew, and safer for our oceans.

Ecostore has also partnered with Live Ocean, a marine conservation charity founded by sailors Peter Burling and Blair Tuke, donating one dollar from every litre of boat wash sold helps support their Live Ocean Foundation in the work it does protecting our oceans.

Ecostore also actively supports Yacht Club Youth Programmes to educate and encourage future generations to appreciate and protect our ocean environments. Harken Fosters is also an extensive sponsor of youth sailing in New Zealand.

About Harkens Fosters

Fosters Chandlery has been in the business of selling marine equipment to the boating industry for over 114 years. From their original iconic location on Fanshawe Street to their new home in Westhaven Marina, the Fosters name has been renowned throughout New Zealand for the supply of high-tech equipment to builders of super and racing yachts through to owners of classic yachts, cruising boats and dinghies.

As well as being a retail store, the Westhaven location is also a technical service centre where the highly experienced Fosters team can recommend, specify and service their extensive product range representing some of the world’s leading marine manufacturers.

Harken Fosters is owned by Harken NZ Ltd and distributes Harken products throughout NZ. They stock well-known brands such as Marlow, Crewsaver, Tylaska, clothing brands Musto and Zhik as well as a range of traditional products such as Oakum, copper nails and roves, brass wood screws, silicon bronze fastenings and brass rubbing strips.

About Ecostore
Ecostore is the leading environmental and sustainable brand in New Zealand, focused on Home, Body and Baby. In 1993 Malcolm and Melanie Rands started ecostore in a small New Zealand ecovillage. They were on a mission to help families care for their homes, their health and the world. Wanting to support this mission but also build on it, the Kraus family initially became involved with ecostore in 2003, with the ownership passing to this Kiwi family in 2015. The company is now led by managing director Pablo Kraus, and the values and ethics of the company are still ecostore’s highest priority. This care goes into every home, body and baby product, because ecostore believes it should be easy for you to create a safer home, a healthier world and a better tomorrow.

Ecostore is an exemplar of how a business can take transformative action to rethink how they use plastics and inspire systemwide change. To enable people to reduce their use of nonrenewable singleuse plastics, ecostore:

1. Shifted from fossilbased plastic to plastic from a sustainable resource – sugarcane – which is fully recyclable.
2. Incorporate postconsumer recycled (PCR) plastic into their products – currently they use 50% PCR plastic in dish powder bottles and 10% PCR plastic in their two highest volume products, laundry and dish liquid bottles, with plans to increase this over time.
3. Provide refill stations to enable people to reuse bottles and have made these easier to access for more people by increasing the number of stations and expanding from green stores to mainstream supermarkets.
4. Introduced a closedloop packaging return program to take responsibility for their products at endoflife. This creates highquality recycling streams, which helps keep the resource in circulation.
5. Reduced the amount of plastic they use in bottles by 1518% for a number of their high-volume products, therefore reducing the overall use of plastic for the same product and purchasing practices.
6. Launched an innovative new cleaning concentrate to help reduce New Zealand’s plastic footprint. Packed in tiny, child-safe glass bottles, the 10x concentrated and powerful formula can be combined with tap water in reusable spray bottles, minimising the packaging and transport of containers that are mostly filled with water. The move will remove 97,000 plastic bottles a year and save 6.45 tonnes of plastic waste a year.

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