In 24 years of civil engineering, I've seen enough 'unsuitable' material to fill several Auckland landfills.
In a traditional linear mindset, silty or clay-heavy soils are liabilities—expensive to excavate and even more expensive to dump. But to an engineer, "unsuitable" is simply a material that hasn't been properly designed for. My sustainability journey didn't start with a moral epiphany; it started with a technical challenge to eliminate waste from the project balance sheet.
The "aha" moment came with the 2017 ICE Brassey Award. We successfully used draining geogrids to stabilise 17-metre slopes using on-site marginal fills that others would have trucked to a landfill. It wasn't just a technical win; it was a commercially ruthless one. By dodging UK landfill taxes—then roughly £94.15 per tonne—and removing the need for imported aggregates, we proved that resource efficiency is the ultimate driver of project ROI.
We are now applying that same civil engineering rigour to Aotearoa’s textile waste crisis. New Zealand buries 220,000 tonnes of textiles and soft goods annually, while our construction sector remains addicted to carbon-heavy virgin materials. To many, a discarded shirt is a charity-shop burden; to ēkot, it is high-performance feedstock. We are intercepting these materials and turning an environmental liability into a local resource.
As CTO, my directive is to transition this waste into Certified Circular Raw Materials (CRM). Through our R&D programme with the University of Waikato, we are validating shredded textiles as high-value inputs for geotextiles and fibre-reinforced concrete. We aren’t interested in low-value "upcycling." We are engineering materials that meet BRANZ standards, ensuring every fibre is validated, verifiable, and traceable for the infrastructure sector.
The market timing is critical. With the NZ construction waste levy rising to $40 per tonne by July 2026 and mandatory embodied carbon reporting becoming a reality, the cost of the status quo is skyrocketing. Specifiers and contractors no longer want "green" stories; they need data-backed performance. ēkot differentiates by providing the technical architecture required to navigate these incoming regulatory caps.
My vision for ēkot is to see our civil infrastructure built with the very materials we once ignored. We have already proven it is possible with marginal soils; now we are closing the loop on industrial waste. The mission is to replace virgin extraction with technical regeneration, future-proofing the New Zealand construction supply chain. The loop is turning, and we are here to lead it.
