Ten years ago I read an interview with the New Zealand artist George Nuku, and it rearranged how I see plastic. Until then plastic had seemed to me an uncomplicated symbol of what we were doing wrong: a by-product of an extractive industry, designed to last, turning up in the places we claimed to love. Much of that is true. But Nuku asked something harder. What if the bottle in your hand is not meaningless simply because you have finished with it? What if it has a genealogy, and a future? (Karen Jacobs 2022)
That did not make plastic innocent. It made it harder to throw away thoughtlessly. Plastic is extraordinarily good at some things: protecting food, carrying water, keeping medicine sterile. Its durability is exactly why it turns into a problem the moment we treat it as disposable. Nuku was not denying any of that. He was refusing the idea underneath it, that the material stops mattering when we stop wanting it.
Once you have heard his question you start noticing where the answer is supposed to live, and mostly it does not. A package is designed in extraordinary detail to persuade you to bring it home: typography, colour, hierarchy, photography, a precise understanding of where a hand will go and what an eye will notice. The same package reaches the end of its short useful life carrying, at best, a small grey icon it inherited from a compliance meeting. The asymmetry is so complete that for years I summarised it the way this essay’s title still does: nobody designs the goodbye.
The complaint was true for a long time
The explanation felt obvious and slightly damning. Selling is a job and disposing is not. The front of the pack has a marketing budget and the back has a legal one, so the arrival gets craft and the departure gets small print. And for a long time in New Zealand the goodbye genuinely could not be designed, at least not truthfully, because there was nothing national to say. What was recyclable in one district was rubbish in the next, so no honest instruction could be printed on an object that might be binned anywhere in the country. The complaint was easy to hold because it was true.
It has stopped being true, and the stopping is recent enough that I nearly missed it.
Somebody now has the job
Since February 2024, every district and city council in the country has had to accept the same core set of materials at the kerb: glass bottles and jars, paper and cardboard, aluminium and steel cans, and plastics marked 1, 2, and 5. (Ministry for the Environment 2024) For the first time there is one national answer to print.
And the printing has a system too. The Australasian Recycling Label, launched in 2018 by the packaging body APCO with Planet Ark and PREP Design, puts a per-component disposal instruction on the pack itself: recycle this part, check your local rules for that one, this part is rubbish. It is not decoration. The label can only be applied after a technical assessment of the packaging, and a component is marked recyclable only if more than 80% of the population can actually recycle it at the kerb. It sits on more than 255,000 products across Australia and New Zealand, and the Ministry for the Environment is advancing it as New Zealand’s preferred on-pack recycling label, with a leadership forum stood up in May 2024 to drive adoption. (Australasian Recycling Label (APCO) 2018) (Ministry for the Environment 2024) The two designs interlock, which is the detail I find quietly satisfying: that 80% rule meant the label could barely tell the truth here while every council differed, so the unglamorous rulebook of February 2024 is precisely what makes the honest label possible now.
So the title of this essay is wrong, or at least out of date. Somebody has the job. The goodbye is being designed, nationally, on evidence, by people who will never be thanked for it. It is just being designed late, and incompletely, and the late and the incompletely are where the real subject starts.
What the numbers still say
Between 2021 and 2023 New Zealand sent an average of 688 kg of waste per person to municipal landfill every year. (Ministry for the Environment 2024) On the narrow household measure we recycle 38%, about average for the OECD; across household, commercial, and construction waste the comparable national rate is 39%, against Australia’s 63%. (Ministry for the Environment 2025) And the Ministry estimates that 13% of household waste could have been recycled if it had gone into the right bin. (Ministry for the Environment 2024)
That last figure is the one that stays with me, because it is not a story about people declining to care. It is the gap between a rule that now exists and an instruction that has not yet reached most of the places the rule gets used. If the final act of a material’s life is treated as an inconvenience, we teach ourselves that the material was only valuable while it belonged to us. The 13% is that lesson, measured.
The gap that is actually left
The honest remainder is narrower than the complaint I started with, and more interesting. The ARL reaches the pack. It does not reach the bin in the park, the classroom, the café counter, the marae kitchen, or the office recycling station: the public surfaces where a great deal of the actual deciding happens, away from home and away from anything with a label on it. It speaks English in a country where te reo Māori is an official language. Its tone is regulatory, which is not a criticism so much as a description of who had to build it. And it is licensed to packaging companies rather than free for anyone to pick up and put on a bin.
Love You, Bye is an attempt to live inside exactly that remainder, and only that remainder: an open-licence, bilingual set of sorting marks, warmer in tone, for the surfaces the pack label does not cover, designed to agree with the national rules and the ARL rather than compete with them. A mark cannot repair a material that was never recyclable; it is the interface to a system, not the system. The lineage here is Norway’s, where the waste sector published Sorteringsmerker in 2020: one shared, freely usable set of sorting marks appearing identically on packaging and bins across the country, translated into 11 languages. (LOOP 2020) The lineage matters because the failure mode is so obvious: a fourth incompatible set of icons would be a contribution to the confusion, not to the goodbye. And where the marks draw on te reo or tikanga they have to be built with Māori partners and accountable to them, not decorated with a worldview borrowed for warmth, the same worldview the previous national waste strategy connected to whakapapa and to seeing value in materials rather than rubbish. (Ministry for the Environment 2023)
Nuku’s question was never really about whether plastic is good or bad. It was about whether the object in your hand still has standing once you are done with it, whether it has somewhere to be next and a way of telling you so. The bottle’s genealogy is printed on its front in full colour, by people at the top of their craft. Its future gets a grey icon, sometimes, when the packaging assessment stretched that far. The distance between those two print jobs is closing, rule by rule, label by label, surface by surface. What is left to design is not the goodbye. It is everywhere the goodbye still has to happen without one.