Waste warrior thinks big

When Mike Smith sold his wine-making business five years ago, he talked his wife Alyssa into a global adventure. They spent 18 months in remote parts of the world, including the border regions of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, in Kurdish villages near Iraq and Iran, and in North Korea and the north-east of Russia. Edgy types of places.

- ALAN DEANS

Fact file

Mike Smith

Owner of Zero Co, a home cleaning and body care products company with a core goal of ridding oceans of plastic waste. Age 39, married to Alyssa.

His school teacher parents, Judy and Steve, taught him that he had a responsibility to people and the planet. His first job was at McDonald's, where he learned about teamwork and responsibility. As a teen, he surfed and took guitar lessons, planning one day to be a professional basketball player. "I was a terrible saver of money as a young person. My sister saved from working at the local cinema, and I had the largest record collection at high school." He encourages young people to become involved in any type of activity that would help to save the planet.

What really left a mark on them was the amount of rubbish they saw. “It really affected me,” Smith explains. “I didn’t consider myself as an eco-warrior before that, but it was a life-changing experience. I returned to Australia in 2019, and committed myself to trying to solve the problem. I have been doing it every day since.”

His challenge is big and bold. Smith hasn’t limited his focus, for instance, on his home town of Byron Bay or even to the northern NSW coast. “I had an insight to solve the plastic problem globally,” he says. “There are two things we had to do. First of all, we have to stop making single-use plastic because, if we keep dumping more and more of that, we will never catch up. We have to find a way to do large-scale ocean clean-ups.”