Mō mātou
About Love You Bye
Materials have value. Say goodbye properly.
In February 2024, Aotearoa New Zealand standardised what can be recycled at kerbside. Plastics 1, 2, and 5. Glass bottles and jars. Paper and cardboard. Aluminium and steel cans. Aerosol cans. The materials are the same everywhere.
But the communication is not. Sixty-seven territorial authorities still use different bin colours, different signage, different iconography, different websites, different tones. The result: recycling is technically standardised but experientially fragmented. People move between districts and encounter different visual languages for the same rules.
Love You Bye is a unified design system — the visual and verbal standard for how waste and recycling is communicated across the country. Free, open source, designed for council adoption.
The numbers
781kg
waste per person per year
OECD, 2023
4th
worst in the OECD
Global Waste Index, 2025
~35%
of waste recycled or reused
Ministry for the Environment
~12%
kerbside contamination (Auckland)
Auckland Council
50%
of landfill is construction waste
Ministry for the Environment
8
councils with no kerbside collection
WasteMINZ
What Love You Bye is
A national design system. Colours, typography, icons, marks, signage templates, and web components — a complete visual language for waste communication.
A product-facing mark. See you soon. Wasted. A clear signal on every product that tells you whether the packaging is recyclable in Aotearoa.
A pressure mechanism. When every product on a shelf carries a Love You Bye mark, you see which brands use recyclable packaging and which do not. Social pressure reinforces regulatory pressure.
A public resource. Open source. Free for council use. Free for manufacturer use. No membership, no license, no permission required.
Open source
Love You Bye is built in public. The code, the design system, the data, and the assets are all freely available. If your council, company, or community group wants to use it, you already can.