Welcome to our newest Partner in Wine, REPOST who currently operate in Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay with a focus on the viticulture industry. Repost takes old and broken fence posts, plus other forms of treated timber waste, and recycle those materials into new fencing products. Their recycling solution reduces treated timber waste being sent to landfill.
REPOST was developed when Greg Coppell needed to fix his farm’s fencing problem. Turns out his solution was even better than he thought – reducing timber waste from vineyards and a landfill problem in New Zealand. Now the viticulture industry and farmers can benefit by choosing REPOST’s affordable fence posts.
We needed 30km of stock fencing for our 500-hectare sheep and beef breeding farm in the Howard Valley on a tight budget. Our first thought was to look for discarded vineyard posts as my dad Allan had been refurbishing them for decades to use as fencing on his farms, selling to neighbouring farmers and friends as well.
Greg Coppell
They found a stockpile of posts at a local vineyard in Marlborough and spent days picking over the pile and loaded up the truck, returning to the farm to repurpose the tall vineyard posts into 1.8m quarter rounds – it was tiresome but rewarding work.
The posts are used on the steep hill country, rolling and river flats of the farm and they work well across all terrains; rocky, granite and clay soils. The posts helped to completely redesign the farm’s paddocks, maximising pasture use and accommodating all stock classes.
Greg was keen to see if there was a way to make this work on a bigger scale, particularly as they knew the viticulture industry disposed of 1000’s of tonnes of useful durable wood in to New Zealand’s landfills every year. A mutual friend put him in touch with Stu, the viticulturalist for Villa Maria, to discuss if the vineyard was interested in repurposing their waste wood into fence posts.
Stu has been in the viticulture industry for 14 years and has been lucky enough to be involved in moving several vineyards to organics, as well as being part of company and industry level discussions around sustainability. He knows that the viticulture industry prides itself on being sustainable and is always looking for ways to lower their environmental impact.
They very quickly realised this was a solvable issue with a bit of Kiwi ingenuity; and that together we’d make a great team – REPOST was born. Stu’s knowledge and passion for the viticulture industry, sustainability and understanding of CCA timber waste issues is coupled with Greg’s understanding of farming and creativity and innovation in developing ways to process the wood.
CALLING ALL VINEYARDS
Do you have a stockpile of broken vineyard posts? Repost recycle them!
Sign up here: https://www.repost.co.nz/vineyards-introduction
Since starting in late 2020 Repost as of August 23′ has saved 4375 tonnes of CCA treated timber from landfill and allowed farmers to fence over 3530km. They are not slowing down with more wineries joining their sustainable waste solution enabling the wine industry to take positive steps towards the goal of being zero landfill to waste by 2050.
They supply Half Rounds, Quarter Rounds from the recycled posts 1.6 and 1.8 metre lengths, pointed or un-pointed and soon will be providing 50 x 40 mm battens as well.