"We first engaged the Go Well team back at the start of 2024 , recognising that while we had the best intentions to advance in the sustainability space we lacked a clear roadmap. Through our collaboration with Go Well, we're now demonstrating that strategic sustainability initiatives can add value to the bottom line. We've renewed our partnership for another year—a testament to the exceptional value they provide and the opportunities that authentic sustainability has created for our business."
– JOANNE McMAHON, GENERAL MANAGER, RTL
RTL is a New Zealand manufacturer and supplier of traffic signs and electronic road safety and traffic management equipment. They are a well-established player in a sector that is starting to reckon with its environmental footprint, and when they came to us in 2024, they were ready to move from good intentions to a structured plan.
We worked with RTL through our Year One programme — twelve months of developing a robust, bespoke sustainability strategy and supporting its early implementation. It’s a format designed to give businesses a solid foundation without overwhelming them, and RTL engaged with it genuinely, which made a real difference to what we were able to achieve together.
One of the standout outcomes of the engagement has been the Better Cone, New Zealand’s first made-in-NZ recycled road cone solution. It’s a genuinely circular model: a closed-loop system that keeps cones out of landfill, supports local manufacturing jobs, and has become a meaningful point of difference for RTL in a competitive market. What’s particularly encouraging is that it isn’t just good for RTL — it’s actively helping their customers meet their own ESG commitments, which is exactly the kind of value chain thinking that makes sustainability commercially durable rather than just a cost centre.
Alongside that, RTL has made real progress on measurement. They’ve established a GHG emissions baseline and now track their emissions monthly — a discipline that might sound straightforward but is genuinely rare among manufacturers of their size, and one that puts them in a strong position to manage and reduce their footprint over time. The engagement also produced RTL’s first Sustainability Progress Report, bringing these threads together into a coherent public account of where they stand and where they’re headed.
RTL’s story is a useful one for any manufacturer sitting on the fence about whether sustainability is relevant to them. The Better Cone alone shows what’s possible when circular economy thinking gets applied to a product most people wouldn’t look twice at.
We speak to RTL in our ‘Progress in Practice‘ podcast.
Road cones. New Zealanders love to hate them. But until recently, when they wore out, they went straight to landfill. RTL decided to change that — and built the country’s first fully closed-loop cone recycling programme to prove it.
The real problem isn’t the cones themselves. It’s what happens to them when they’re damaged, worn out, or forgotten. Until recently, the answer for most cones was simple and wasteful — landfill.
RTL decided to change that.
In this episode, host Nick Morrison sits down with Joanne McMahon, General Manager of RTL, to hear the full story behind Better Cone — from first idea to market.
Listen to the episode:
If you’re a manufacturer or infrastructure supplier ready to take that first structured step, we’d love to talk.