How A Former Otago Business Student Saved One Million Cups From Landfill

Twelve years after being inspired by the waste of plastic cups at a Dunedin stadium rugby match, a former student’s reusable cup washing service has saved over a million drinking vessels from landfill, and is making millions from events put on by the likes of U2, FIFA, and Live Nation.

Ryan Everton picked up top place in 2012’s Audacious Business challenge for developing what has today become TURN Systems - reusable cups designed to stop plastic from being recycled or rubbished.

Ryan Everton told the Diaspora.nz entrepreneurship podcast this week that it was his Otago student days which inspired him to found the company which recently achieved USD11.5m valuation and has picked up contracts with Live Nation to supply reusable cups to America’s top music festivals.
“I was at a rugby game at Forsyth Barr stadium in 2012 and there was a clear issue with single-use plastic cups, and I thought it was a business opportunity,” Everton says.

The business award Everton picked up earned him coaching from David Quinn, who used to work alongside Apple founder Steve Jobs. It wasn’t long before the cups became the go-to option each year for thousands of events around the world which want to minimise waste. The number of cups washed over the years has surpassed one million, Everton estimates.

A turning point for TURN was when it supplied U2's international tour in 2019, Everton told Diaspora.

“The manager of U2 at the time, Guy Oseary, really wanted music artists to move to reuse because there was a movement happening, predominantly in Europe, and these artists that he was managing were all asking for plastic free concerts.”

Oseary became Turn’s first investor and guided the company towards the global market - with millions of investment help from Ashton Kutcher, with whom Oseary runs A-Grade Investments.

Across the last four years, Covid lockdowns’ impact on festivals worldwide hit hard, but Everton says as lockdowns were beginning, TURN Systems was investing in technology to allow it to speed up cup washing. Today the company can wash up to 10,000 cups an hour, using tech invented by a California-based Kiwi who attended the University of Otago with Everton and built a lot of the equipment Everton’s company today depends on.

The efficiency Turn is now known for is a long way from the company’s humble beginnings, with Everton telling the Diaspora podcast that his first contract was supplying reusable cups to a Tuborg-sponsored music festival -- and washing the cups in his mum’s dishwashers in Taupo.

A farming background of self-reliance – as well as a pie ban lain down by Helen Clark – gave him a start in business, Everton added.

“Growing up on a farm, there’s a mindset of “You have to do it yourself,” and the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be.”

“I grew up on a farm and my family were all entrepreneurs… During high school, I had my first business at 15. The New Zealand government had banned meat pies in schools, Helen Clark banned meat pies, banned Coca-Cola, so I started my own internal tuck shop in my dorm room at Whanganui Collegiate selling pies. It was hugely successful… I almost got expelled at the time, the headmaster brought me in.”

“It was my first time having an investor. I had a wealthy Taiwanese friend and he bankrolled the whole thing. We both made a bunch of money. He’s now a dentist and I’m still an entrepreneur.”

Having grown far beyond Whanganui and Dunedin and moved to the US, Everton and Turn Systems have done business with countless household names. In recent years Turn has picked up rewashable cup contracts with Red Bull festivals, Golden State Warriors games, Formula 1, Lollapalooza, NASCAR, Chick-fil-A, and the huge entertainment and concert company Live Nation -- which needs to minimise the amount of vast amount of empty water bottles, disposable cups, wristbands and food packaging left behind at the thousands of concerts it puts on every years in numerous countries. Turn Systems has also received investment from Google For Startups’ Circular Economy accelerator.

Two of the next big contracts come with California banning single use plastics at stadiums, and Starbucks trialling rewashable cups in an effort to reduce waste from the seven billion cups it uses each year.

“I wanted to build something my kids could be proud of,” Everton told the Diaspora podcast. “I feel a lot of people in Silicon Valley make a million bucks then don’t know where to go… but I think the reason people join Turn is you can make the world better now and you can make money doing it.”

The Diaspora podcast was founded by young Hamilton venture capitalist and investor David Booth in an effort to counter “brain drain” after Booth returned from seven years overseas and noticed many Kiwis running companies weren’t as closely connected with New Zealand as he felt they should have been. Now in its second season, Diaspora.nz every week interviews entrepreneurs leading massive companies around the world.

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