sustainability
Opito Bay Salt is proud to be certified a Carbon Friendly Business with Ekos. This means that we used Ekos *lite calculator to estimate and offset our business’s 2023/2024 operational emissions with certified carbon credits. The activities we measured include production, packaging, transportation, and operations. Ekos offsets grow and protect forests in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and help to deliver climate resilience, waterways protection, erosion control, biodiversity conservation, and community economic development.
One of the reasons we were driven to the idea of salt farming was because it epitomises a sustainable and environmentally friendly business, using just seawater and sunshine to produce wonderful tasty sea salt.
However, for us, sustainability is now more of the journey than we ever envisaged and it keeps evolving. We try to do lots of small things to help make an overall difference.
Our packaging is comprised of a fully compostable box and recyclable clear plastic pouch which are re-sealable providing customers a tamper-proof, air-sealed product plus a convenient way to store after opening.
We use pumps and gravity to move water so we minimise the use of carbon-based fuels. We also utilize permeable weed matting on the floors of our greenhouses returning our main by-product, pure water back to the ground.
Plastic for our greenhouses is fully recyclable and has a working life of +10 years. Our salt farm is situated so that no productive farmland is compromised.
Our main source of waste is packaging. We choose to use suppliers who use less packaging which is just a really practical solution given transport costs to our remote location. Where we can we re-use cardboard packaging to send product to retailers.
All our greenhouse salt pans are on elevated tables constructed of recycled wooden pallets. We use pumps and gravity to move water to minimise the use of carbon-based fuels.
Living remotely, we really focus on waste. 100% of organic waste is composted, 20% of paper waste is composted 80% recycled. Less than 0.05% of our waste goes to landfill.
Where possible we choose local ingredients for infusions and blends. But we prefer to grow ingredients for our sea salt flavours like rosemary and fennel or use NZ wild foraged such as porcini.
This provides sustainably produced spray free high-quality ingredients. Wild foraged seaweed is used to create our own organic fertilizer-Sea weed soup. Local is also what drives our ethos, cutting down food miles, so over 80% of ingredients are grown in NZ.
We use a composter and worm farm for food and vegetable matter. The resulting worm tea and compost feed our many rosemary plants used in one of our sea salt blends.