In 2012, 19-year-old Ryan Everton was at a rugby match when he noticed the mountain of single-use cups piling up around him. That moment sparked an idea that would soon win the top prize at the Audacious student startup competition and grow into a business with international reach.
He called it Globelet, a reusable cup company built on a simple concept: festival-goers pay a small deposit for a cup, reuse it throughout the event, and either return it for a refund or take it home as a keepsake.
Globelet quickly caught on at festivals across New Zealand and Australia. The model not only reduced waste but also saved organisers money and created a cleaner, safer event environment. By reinvesting profits into innovation, the company developed better washing systems, new reusable bottle options, and scalable solutions for large events.
The business has since rebranded as TURN, reflecting its wider mission to end single-use packaging.
Today, TURN partners with Live Nation and is set to mitigate more than one million single-use cups in just a year through that partnership.
From an idea born at a rugby game to a company changing the way events operate, TURN is proof of how student startups can go on to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.