Introducing Emma Fryer

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, I’ve heard that there was a whole forest of trees planted by school children in Golden Downs, near Nelson. Every year since, local children have continued that tree planting tradition within the same forest estate.

The coronation of King Charles brought this previous activity to mind and made me reflect on how there is a ritual element to tree planting, especially when we have an occasion of significance. My own family has harnessed this tradition, planting trees for both births and deaths for our wider family and friends.

Given the challenges we are facing today with climate change and loss of biodiversity, however, it’s not enough to just plant the trees and walk away. We also have to ensure those trees survive and thrive. I wonder what the survivability rate of all the trees planted for the Queen’s coronation has been?

Every day we all make high and low involvement choices. Low involvement choices are things like what you have for breakfast, brushing your teeth, and putting your socks on, etc. High involvement decisions are the choices we make that lead to a positive change, such as making a commitment to an entirely new way of doing things, embarking on a new course of study, or making a career change. The future of our planet is reliant on high involvement choices from people who are not afraid to challenge the status quo. There has never been a more important time for sustainable innovation.

When I was 15, my dad had just started a conservation and ecology company and I was working with him in the holidays to earn a bit of extra money.

We were working on a site next to a waterway, with the goal of restoring the health of the stream and increasing biodiversity in the area. We had tidied it up, sprayed it, planted it, and the final step was installing good old fashioned green core flute plastic plant guards. This was the step that didn’t make sense to me. We had just spent all this time trying to restore the site, only to be introducing imported plastic into the environment, which would then need to be retrieved again a year later.

I asked my dad why we were using plastic guards when there had to be an environmentally friendly alternative, only for him to inform me that what we were using was the best of a bad bunch. He explained the importance of using plant guards and then set me the challenge to see if I could come up with something better.

That’s when my parents and I made a series of high involvement decisions. I spent a couple of years experimenting with prototypes as part of the Young Enterprise Scheme, trying to come up with a biodegradable plant guard. It didn’t take me long to realise why they hadn’t been done before. Finally, after coming across an imported, waxed cardboard, I was able to create 34 samples and install them on new planting in the Maitai.

My parents and I watched the trial and were blown away by the success of the plants that had had these cardboard guards. The following year, in 2017, my dad contacted a New Zealand manufacturer who had just brought out a specialty cardboard, the only one of its kind in New Zealand, that would be able to withstand the challenging environmental conditions of a riparian site plus the test of time. 

We decided to take the leap and invest in getting 5000 units made from this board and the EmGuard was born.

Before the year was out, we had a call from a Nelson business wanting to purchase 23,000 EmGuards. Talk about a heart stopping moment! This month we reached the milestone of two million EmGuards sold countrywide.

What’s important about this whole story, however, isn’t just how many trees have been planted, it’s how many trees and plants have survived thanks to EmGuards having protected them over the past seven years.

We know that plants with EmGuards have more than a 90 percent survival rate in normal conditions. We also know that plants without a guard might have a survival rate as low as 20 percent. Implementing EmGuards in place of plastic alternatives also reduces the need for the extra labour cost of going back and removing plastic after a year. EmGuards continue to protect their trees for up to three years, making maintenance significantly easier.

That means that approximately 1.92 million plants exist in the world, when it might have only been 400,000 (which is the 20 percent survival rate at least one of our customers experienced in one of their particular challenging areas before they started using EmGuards).

I can look back now on as many as 1.5 million positive outcomes from a high involvement decision I took at 15 years old.

I’ve learnt that in business, waiting till something is perfect is not always the safe route. There is never a perfect time to launch an idea, but the most important thing is that you believe in what you are doing. As Simon Sinek says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.

My personal ‘why’ is to rebuild and strengthen the health of not only our local awa but also streams, rivers, and wetlands all around the country.

In order to get there, we need everyone who is planting to not accept the status quo, to expect better than that, and to choose sustainable solutions that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the planting work they’re doing.

So next time we have a ceremonial tree planting, I want to know that the tree will be there for future generations to enjoy. I’m sure that’s a sentiment that King Charles himself would support. Trees link us to both our ancestors and to future generations. We are all kaitiaki and as planters of trees the future is literally in our hands.