We’re a small business, operating in a really precious environment, both ecologically and socially. It’s rare to have visitors to our village not comment on the natural beauty of the place and sense of peace and community of the village itself. So we feel we have a tremendous responsibility to do everything we can to support that, without changing the very thing that we and our visitors appreciate so much about our area.
‘Sustainable’ is a fashionable and often used word, but it basically sums up what we want our small business and place in the world to be. We really want our impact here at Okarito Kayaks to be positive to our natural environment and social surrounds. The opportunity we have to enable visitors to experience, learn about, and therefore value, the fantastic wetlands and forests at our doorstep, without damaging in any way the places they are exploring, is the main reason we operate this business.
Alongside that focus on the natural environment, our activity has the chance to provide meaningful local employment; a social resource or hub for the young families in the village; support for local businesses through our commercial activity; and to strengthen and protect the social aspects of the community in which we live. There are easier places both to live and make money, but we’ve chosen this place because we feel a deep connection to the values and environment here. Our primary focus should therefore be on protecting and enhancing what it is we loved about the place enough to choose it as home.
Below, you’ll find some of the things we do, and some of the things we’ve chosen not to do, to look after our place as best we can. We can show you why once you’re here with us.
Leave only footprints, take only photographs.
We have a great opportunity to educate visitors about the high value of the natural landscape and ecology of the area. Through our briefings of kayakers, printed information we provide to accompany their kayak trips, expert local guided interpretation on the water, and day-to-day conversations as we serve coffee, we can support an increasing awareness of the importance of protecting the natural environment that visitors have experienced here.
No waste – we can use it.
We make every effort we can to reuse and recycle as much as we possibly can of the products we consume in providing services for our kayakers, and in our own lives here. The cleaning products we use are biodegradable; we sell no single use packaging or products for both the coffee and food we produce; we salvage and recycle as much material as we can to make our small business work, from home-made kayak trolleys, to tea china from local Op-shops, to bookcases made of old ladders.
Hey, it’s South Westland – why would you throw things away, it’s not like there’s a ton of shops here for shiny new things. Coffee grinds and any food scraps help our garden grow. We send on average less than 1kg of rubbish a week to landfill from our business, and over the last six years, have removed some 800 litres of rubbish from around the edge of the lagoon shoreline through our volunteer project, GorseBusters.
Meaningful carbon reduction.
Back in 2022, we calculated our carbon emissions output and found that we emitted approximately 3 tonnes of carbon from our operations per year. Not a lot, comparatively — we’re not chugging up and down the lagoon burning petrol; we don’t shuttle our kayakers across the countryside by diesel vans, and our business by intrinsic design, had always limited its outputs. But, given our already low emissions, we found that going through the carbon-zero auditing process would cost us fifteen times more in certifying costs than the cost of offsetting the minimal carbon emissions we did actually have.
So, we took a different approach. Instead of just paying for a carbon-free sticker, we decided to invest our resources in reducing further any emissions we do have, rather than just offsetting. By 2024, we had replaced our two-vehicle fleet with solely electric and hybrid, removing the largest source (calculated as 77% in 2022) of our carbon emissions to near zero, with 98% of our vehicle journeys now powered solely by electricity.
There’s still more work to do, but we think directing resources towards meaningful carbon removal actions, rather than just seeking the marketing badge, is a better approach. The tiny remaining carbon emissions we do have are more than offset by the native trees we plant around our kayak shed property each year – but we’d do this anyway; we enjoy the place more with those plants and trees in place.
We know not everyone can afford to switch over to electric vehicles – but, businesses do have a leadership opportunity Given the range of vehicles now available, there’s no reason not to invest in electric vehicles for businesses; it’s a choice. For us, it’s really worked well, and we believe it’s more robust and meaningful than just offsetting.
It’s still better to tow a kayak by hand down to the wharf on our kayak trolley than drive it, or pick up a neighbours post from town rather than have them drive in. After all, have you seen the prices of power transmission and petrol down here … ??!!
Community matters.
Where we can, we get involved. Out here, you can’t rely on someone else to just do things for you; it’s a community effort.
We are first responders for medical emergencies within our community and have organised Pre-Hospital Emergency Care courses to be held here at the kayak shed and locally, for the South Westland community to upskill to help themselves. We’ve fundraised and organised an AED to be placed in Ōkārito for emergencies and keep medical oxygen on hand to be able to respond to any medical emergency that might occur locally.
In our twelve years being fortunate to live and work here, we’ve served on public boards such as the West Coast Tai Poutini Conservation Board; local school governance and fundraising; volunteer industry workshops and committees; and leadership roles in community associations – all of which take a significant amount of time and commitment but contributes to the health and future direction of our communities. Voices matter.
If it’s broke, fix it.
The road down to the local wharf gets potholes. We’ll get a wheelbarrow and fill them in.
Gorse is spreading along the beautiful river channels spidering out from the lagoon. We’ll get in and cut it out (well, us and our small army of volunteers we seem to have coerced into helping, through GorseBusters).
Small and big actions make a difference. We don’t believe in just waiting for someone else to do this for us.
Sometimes it’s what you don’t do.
It’s a small thing, but sometimes not doing things is as important as doing them. We know we could send our kayakers out well into the evening throughout the summer here in Ōkārito, with beautiful long daylight hours, and earn more income as a result – but this town is ours to share, and minimising our noise and vehicle impact on neighbours who choose to live here for the peace and quiet is really important, to them as well as us.
Similarly, we know local residents don’t want to see big coaches that might be larger than their houses or large groups of visitors being disgorged into the middle of our small town, dominating the environment with noise and visual impact. There’s a balance to be struck between attracting the visitors that will support jobs in the town and help pay for local services and changing the very character of the place that makes it an attractive place to live. We are conscious of that balance and deliberately and proactively manage numbers of visitors to our business so as not to negatively impact others. The local towns of Franz Josef and Fox Glacier are better placed to serve large coaches, for a balance of opportunity for both visitors and residents.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
Providing the basics.
May not seem like a lot, but we’re a small town where extra vehicles and people quickly have a big impact. Just doing the basics like providing safe, off-the-road car parking for our kayakers, as well as toilets, and somewhere to put rubbish, is the right thing to do, rather than relying on others to provide those facilities.
Even simple things like paying our fair share of local business rates, recognising that if you have a business here, you take up more resources and benefit from local roading more than just those who are just living here. Just seems fair, right?
Can we help?
We’re fortunate to have an asset. If you’re running a local community event here in South Westland and are fundraising at your event, we’d like to hear from you.
Whenever we can, we’ll support communities from Hokitika to Haast, whether it’s passing on info and putting up posters at the kayak shed, or providing a donated kayaking prize for winners at the Bruce Bay Sports Day, South Westland A&P or Blue Spur Mountain Biking Enduro.
And if you’re a local school or not-at-all-local school that wants to get your kids out into the wider world, we want to help. We’ll discount as heavily as we can for schools. Worth it to see the look on the kids faces as they paddle off into the secluded moss-dripping rainforest with no iPads to distract them …
Keeping it local.
Maybe it’s parochial, but we reckon the more we can support and work with local businesses, the better. After all, it’ll be our local mechanic helping out any of our visitors stick on the side of the road; working together is what keeps this place ticking along.
There are some great folk out there in South Westland that run small businesses; Jase at West Coast Printing, Josh and Kirsty at the Franz Josef Four Square, Ian the tireless (no pun) mechanic in Whataroa, and we all rely on each other to keep going. Keep it local and it’ll still be there when you really need it.
And growth. Or not.
If you come by Okarito Kayaks in a year’s time and see a big golden M up on the front lawn, or us building a three storey shed for kayak storage, take us out into the swamp and leave us there.
We truly believe Ōkārito is special. It doesn’t need to be bigger, doesn’t need to have more. Most people who live here generally don’t want more. We don’t want to force that on them, intentionally or not. Rich and Ed — from whom we took this business on, and whose values are still imprinted into the tidy lawns and homemade bunting—always said to us that the kayak sheds were the first thing that people often saw as they came into Ōkārito and would often be one of the main impressions people left with.
We don’t need to be the biggest business on the West Coast, or even in the Franz Josef area for that matter. It’s enough just being in Ōkārito. So, we’re not after lots more kayaks. Or longer hours. We will remain a business where you can come in and talk to us, and we’ll make time to answer your questions about why we moved here. As if it’s not obvious… (-:
The Tiaki Promise is an undertaking to care for people and place, a commitment to care for New Zealand.
By our actions and by our example, we want to live up to that promise. We’ve won multiple awards for our sustainability initiatives; we can talk endlessly about the values described in Tiaki.
But, hold us to account. Come and talk to us to see how we’re backing up that promise, and help us look after the people and places that make Ōkārito and Aotearoa New Zealand so special.
Ōkārito is a small West Coast town looking a halt a gorse invasion – but it takes an army.
Gorse is on the march at Ōkārito Lagoon. It’s threatening biodiversity; choking native wetland plants, bird habitat and inhibiting whitebait breeding…
The phenomenal work ethic of a volunteer army has the gorse scourge at a West Coast beauty spot in retreat
