Sustainable from the Start

The plan was always to make Marketday sustainable. With two teenagers and dinner time chats circling around the state of the climate, there was no way we could make anything that would end up in landfill.

We know that simply using a cart is "green" choice. It requires one to walk, meaning fewer emissions, more steps on your fitness tracker, and a fun way to explore your neighborhood's shops and characters.  That’s great once we get to that point, but how we got there was an important conversation.

Every decision about material we’ve made has been made by asking and answering questions: Will the material last, can it be fixed, can it be recycled, what happens at its end of life cycle? 

Partnering with Clandestine Design Group – a mighty team of designers with vast experience in answering questions, the frame came together with aluminium as the hero material - an endlessly recyclable product. The support act is recycled plastic for various parts and connectors, and durable cotton canvas for the baskets. Should anything get damaged, it's designed to be repaired, rather than replaced. The questions go on, and the sustainability journey continues, but it's front and centre for us as we grow.

The cart is an everyday object, ignored for decades. We’re excited to have finally remade it into something strong and beautiful, so it can be handed down from one generation to the next – our ultimate sustainability goal. 

Re-use, re-use and re-use again.

When we get back to questions, we obviously had many about the way we live. 

We are gobsmacked by the idea that a typical supermarket trolley of groceries in Australia has clocked up 70,000 kilometres of food miles when it reaches your kitchen bench.  That is equal to almost two trips around the planet! However, a simple change of filling your cart at the local market slashes that figure to almost zero and that's just the beginning.

A cart full of goods from the market, supports growers who are constantly being beaten down on price by the big guys. You get a wider variety of produce, which (gasp!) actually changes with the seasons. There's less packaging, which further reduces your impact. And you get more social interactions to boot, which has been proven to improve mental health and gets the happiness neurons firing.

Walking your cart around a market is the opposite to wandering the soul-less aisles of supermarkets today, where everything is homogenised, from the air temperature, to the food on the shelves, to the music piped through the speakers. The supermarket is a place of speed and convenience, but the farmer's market is a living, breathing human space that's deliciously imperfect and real.

The market remains a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Despite our perceived advances, people are still made to grow stuff and trade with one another, face-to-face.  Marketday is here to support that, so it doesn't disappear and we can hand that down, along with a well loved cart, to our kids.