"So it was a bit of a family affair."
In his early years, he enjoyed rugby and surfing.
"Then I suppose I just fell into music - the world of music and cars and girls and parties sort of took over."
He says living at Pukehina Beach gave him a sense of freedom, enhanced when he got his own car.
"Having that car meant I could visit my friends, have a girlfriend and go to parties and not be beholden to what my parents were up to. They did allow me a high degree of independence which I feel is serving me really well as an adult.
"Another feature of my childhood was a degree of danger which has allowed me to have a degree of risk analysis available to me as a result."
Leo left school in 2005 to study political science, international relations and media studies.
"I graduated right in the middle of the global financial crisis, so employment opportunities with my degree weren't really feasible - so I became a DJ.
"I spent about eight years living and working as a DJ and that took me around the world - I played some really big shows - in Thailand, India, England, Spain the US, Cuba - and I'm really grateful for my time as a musician."
Something of a crisis of meaning brought him back to New Zealand "to see what was next".
"By then I'd been studying a lot of permaculture - an umbrella term for new and ancient ways of living in harmony with nature. I was studying and also teaching permaculture so when I came back to Aotearoa I started to call myself a sustainability consultant."
Good at reading patterns, he was able to identify issues relating to sustainability for clients and then make recommendations for solutions.
"It just got to the point where I was making a lot of recommendations around waste where there wasn't a solution available and at that point, I just thought 'somebody needs to do something about this'."
The fact his invoices were getting paid led him to believe there was value in finding those solutions, so he decided to have a crack himself.
"Waste is something that everyone agrees they don't want. It doesn't matter where on the political spectrum you are, or the socio-economic spectrum - a conservative person doesn't want waste the same as a hippy environmentalist doesn't want it - it's a unifying topic.
"So I found it to be an effective way to not only make a living but to communicate big-picture change, big-picture ideas in a way that brought everyone on board."
He started Why Waste at a time when there were very few people working in the waste minimisation field.
''Certainly not in a for-profit social enterprise - most of the waste minimisation being done was in community groups or councils, but if someone steps out and says 'I'm going to build a business model around making waste into soil', it's really difficult to make that profitable.
" I think a lot of people recognised the work that was being done and I felt like I got a lot of street cred for the work I was doing, so over the years I earned my stripes a little bit.
Now people listen when they didn't necessarily used to."
He says 10 years ago he was a climate activist, shouting to an empty room.
"I think we've come a long way. It hasn't really penetrated our public discourse to the degree that its severity necessitates, but we'll get there. Not only will we, we have to ."
He has plans of his own to contribute more.
"The next step for me is to look to buy a farm this time next year and I want to reforest the farm by setting up a natural cemetery - pay for a reforestation project by empowering people to make their last dying wish to live forever as an ecosystem."
"I"m really keen on the legacy of death and to not be remembered in slabs of concrete," he says
Leo also has a long-standing interest in the ocean that has its roots in his childhood.
"We had our own waka as a family and we would go sailing over summer and one year I took a year out of school and went sailing around the Pacific Ocean with my family."
Now he is involved in Te Puna Rangiriri Trust, which preserves and promotes the knowledge of celestial navigation.
In 2019 he took part in the Tuia 250 Voyage, a flotilla of Pacific and European vessels, including the HMB Endeavour replica that sailed around Aotearoa New Zealand visiting sites with significant cultural and historical importance to Pacific and European voyaging.
"The group has several voyaging canoes and we sail around New Zealand teaching and learning to sail by the stars."
■ Leo's advice for those on the verge of adulthood: "I encourage humans heading out into the world to develop degrees of comfort with discomfort. One observation I've made about life is that the most valuable lessons always seem to feel the worst.
"Facing our privileges across gender, ethnicity and wealth is a great way to humble ourselves and cultivate empathy and compassion for others."
