Recycled Cardboard Bicycles For $9?
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Assuming they're talking US dollars, that's roughly the price of a bike from the supermarket. Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think a cardboard bike is cool. I'd be particularly interested to hear about what they've done about things like bearings and attaching tyres.
The green side of it is interesting, as is the idea of an explicitly disposable bike. If it's easier to manufacture locally, or on a small scale or whatever, that'd be something. But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.
The bicycle doesn't need to be cheaper than the traditional alternative. In fact, it'd probably sell better if it were slightly more expensive than the alternative, while emphasizing its apparently significant advantages elsewhere: disposability, fashion novelty, and "green"ness, the latter always being valuable social signal, perhaps especially among people I know that are enthusiastic about bicycles.
And steel or aluminium is a lot more recyclable than cardboard.
At the moment the $75 bikes in Walmart are terrible - but mostly because they try and copy $750 bikes with 24gears and full suspension. If you wanted a green solution make very simple, single gear, hub brakes, steel frame bikes in the same factory for $50 and make millions of them.
There is a city bike rental scheme here, but like all the other rental/free bike schemes around the world - it uses some 'novel' bike design which somehow end up costing $1000 each! And so either require credit cards and security or they only distribute 10 of them around the city.
If the crappy bike manufacturers of the world aren't making simple steel utilitarian bikes, they should be. I'd buy one and I already have 2 bikes.
Steel frame, steel handlebars (for safety), sealed bottom bracket, 5 speed rear derailleur and friction disc brakes. 25-30 lbs is fine. Doesn't need any aluminum except for the rims and the chainring.
Here even the outdoor gear coop charges >$900 for a single speed and says it's ideal for "urban life' - which tells you everything about the market for them.
sitkack and I live in Seattle, where our downtown area has hills up to 19% incline, and other areas near downtown (considered bike-friendly areas) have up to 26%.
Source: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/steepest.htm
Admittedly, most of the city is not /that/ steep, but we're up there with you guys on quantity of hills. (I assume that you're from San Francisco.)
Trees fix CO2, so having an excuse to grow more trees, sucking CO2 from the atmosphere, and depositing it in the form of bikes, may be a benefit.
It likely comes down to the amount of energy used in the manufacture. I don't actually know, but intuitively I'd guess that steel manufacture (or aluminum on lighter bikes) uses a lot more energy to manufacture.
But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.
I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.
I'd argue that the cheap bike problem is only currently solved in that cheap, good quality, second-hand bikes are available in most markets.
If this bike barely lasts as long, it'll at least have sold the problem of having all these useless lumps of metal lying around once your cheap bike has died.
Agreed, but the article seemed to be arguing that there was demand for a cheap, essentially disposable, bike and that's what I think is a solved problem
It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.
Good point, I think you and I probably agree here, but I was presuming this bike would be a lot easier to recycle. The fact that there's no direct mention of this in the article is a bit suspicious, so you may well be right and there's no real advantage here.
An aluminium or steel bike is recycled in exactly the same way as a car - and we have got very good at that process - and at the end you have valuable scrap aluminium.
On the other hand, Boston's Hubway cycle hire scheme [1] costs $12 for three days of membership. A bike for $12 could open up interesting avenues for similar bike uses as you wouldn't have to worry about getting the user to return it.
I'm sorry, but bicycles abandoned after a few days of use seems like an incredibly wasteful idea.
Amsterdam has this problem solved in an interesting way. I am told there is a ring of drug addicts that steal and resell bikes for a living. You buy a bike from them for 8-10 euro, ride it around for a couple months until it gets stolen, then buy another stolen bike to replace it and repeat the cycle.
Excuse me? I'm sure bike locks exist that cost a Century or more, but I've never bought one. The locks I buy cost $10-20, which is still well below the purchase price of one of these cycles. And even if I could somehow buy one for the $12 production cost, I'd still lock it up. Because in addition to the annoyance of having lost my $12 possession, now I also have the inconvenience of having to call someone for a ride, or pay for cab fare.
The goal here, as I understand it, is to make the bikes so cheap that there's no resale market for either the bikes or the parts, which might mean a "keeps honest men honest" $10 lock would be good enough.
Have you checked Youtube for the make of lock?
I suspect that if he used the front brake, it would crush the rim. This is one of the big engineering challenges for companies making rims out of carbon fiber: the compression forces from the brake pads can reach up to a thousand psi, because the brake levers provide mechanical advantage and the pads are so small. If that's not enough, the sheer forces can also cause the fibers to separate.
Building bikes out of cardboard is a very cool idea, and I wish him luck, but I think what we're seeing here is a very early and probably still unsafe prototype. There are many engineering challenges to be solved still.
I'd be interested in seeing a cardboard bike frame that was built from molded pieces rather than cut and glued prefab sheets. This is how modern carbon fiber bikes are constructed. I would think that a lot of that tech could cross over.
If it's single gear, you can simply stop pedaling to brake since it would be direct drive. In fact, that would probably be the easiest as I doubt this bike is capable of any serious speed.
see this about stopping a fixed-gear bike: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Stop_a_Fixed_Gear_Bicycle
I don't know about other people, but my primary use for my bicycle is transportation.
Edit: Also, does anyone else think that disposable bikes are a step backwards, not forwards, in terms of environmental responsibility?
Or, you know, I could have bought a cardboard bike.
I feel like while this is a fun project, some people need to sit back and take a big picture view before spending years to develop a product only to realize that you've been bested by the tech of 60 years ago.
I still think there's a lot of room for improvement in modern bikeshare paradigms. The most common time I tell myself 'man, I wish I had a bike' is when I want to get to a convenience store/lunch spot one-three miles away, where walking isn't really feasible but driving seems exorbitant.
I wish there was a system where I could pay fifty cents at a bike station and get the use of a bike for an hour, or something similar. That's my ideal system.
Lots of other cities around the world have bike sharing programs now. The more fancy ones have a smartcard system that you charge up and it deducts money for usage.
Being made of cardboard, I don't think the disposable part is so bad. Cardboard is easily recycled, and, if not recycled, biodegradable. And the trees used to make the original cardboard are a renewable resource. That still leaves the non-cardboard components, but they're a small part of the overall bike.
I think the difference arises that once you factor in the energy it takes to make a cheap product repeatedly (then collect it and recycle it) vs the energy it takes to make a quality product only once.
For a "department store" bike aka "bicycle shaped object" (the kind you buy for $100-$300 from Walmart, Sears, Costco or another store that doesn't actually have anybody that knows how to properly assemble a bike): no.
Those department store bikes are estimated to average something like 75 miles of use in their lifetime (showroom floor to landfill) and are generally not made to be very serviceable.
So if we assume that a $60 cardboard bike is intended to compete with $100 disposable bikes, it's probably still a good step forwards.
And what if you want to travel 10 miles? Or 50? Carry more cargo, climb steeper hills? I think you should adopt this moderate position from a competing industry: "your mileage may vary."
A cardboard bike is probably not great. Bt getting people on bikes is important. If they have an okay experience on a lousy $10 cardboard bike then there's a chance that they go on a buy a bike and use it.
And, like everything else, there's a lot of nonsense spoken about bikes.
Most people do not need carbon fibre frames and titanium widgets etc.
I do live in an area where a single U-lock is enough theft deterrent, which removes the theft concern for me. Without the theft concern I now have a bike that lets me go farther, carry more and lasts longer than cheap bike. That seems like it's a whole lot more useful to me.
Whatever the intent of the manufacturer, I'm convinced that a metal "bicycle shaped object" will get you pretty far if you want. I find it serviceable enough despite its rough origin. The brake levers, derailleurs, frame, and front wheel are all original, but everything else has been replaced.
I doubt much of it would end up in a landfill, metal recycling is far too profitable for that kind of outcome.
After that two years, I still used it as a backup and regularly lent it out to friends; easily 400 miles per year for the next four years. I never upgraded a single component, other than change the tires once and inner tubes as needed. I never changed or oiled the chain; I purposefully did not maintain the bike so I could find out when it would self-destruct. For the past three years, I had been storing the bike outside and uncovered (during Chicago winters). Once spring rolled around, I would just hop on and grind through the rust.
The only reason I stopped riding the bike was because last year both wheels were stolen.
I used to fix bikes and old Raliegh three speeds were just the most amazing machines I've ever dealt with. Replace the rubber parts, true the wheels, and tighten the brakes and they are good to go again... thirty or forty years after they rolled off the assembly line. That is efficient.
I don't know if to say it's standard, but in industrial engineering there's certainly knowledge about it. For example: http://smarterware.org/890/the-office-made-entirely-of-cardb...
You know, something that you could buy on a vacation trip for 20-30$ and just discard at the end. It would not need to be very durable. In fact, it would be fine if it lasted a few weeks. After that, it is biodegradeable paper waste.
I wonder if it would create a new kind of trash, though...
And ofcourse, a lot depends a lot on how the cardboard vehicles stack up against their metal equivalents in terms of usability.
Even if it's cardboard you have to consider how efficiently it can all be recycled and how much energy it takes to create it in the first place, and what happens with any parts that can't be recycled.
As an example, many North American cities are sending their recycling materials overseas, using up a ridiculous amount of fuel.
I guarantee you're doing a lot more for the environment buying used or renting / borrowing. Is it really so inconvenient?
And if they do exhibit catastrophic failure and just average a weeks lifespan, that's a non-starter, because maybe you collapse into the curb the second day you're riding one.
Basically for the reason you gave: "So how don't they last? By collapsing underneath you?"
Planned obsolescence is a pretty old and valid concept. We specifically throw away many things before they get the chance to fail us catastrophically - drugs, brakes, etc.
> average a weeks lifespan
A week was a random number I pulled out of my hat, since that's a typical vacation length for me. Naturally the average would be much longer.
My concern with cardboard is that there is going to be some lower breaking point (especially the fork portion of the bike) due to the stress of riding it on uneven surfaces, debris getting caught in the spokes, or because of user motion. Carbon fiber forks have failed before causing catastrophic injury and death. Depending on tests, it may be an accident waiting to happen.
I guess it could use a similar principal in carbon fiber reinforced polymer, with cardboard taking the place of the carbon fiber and glue taking place of the polymers.
It also reminds me of wood turners who "fill voids" with cyanoacrylate glue so much that the main material they're turning is the CA glue itself.
To be fair, if you want to avoid painful and expensive problems on a bike, the only viable option is to not have the accident in the first place. If you hit something at any noticeable speed, you're going to bend your forks, and it's also pretty easy to bend your wheel beyond repair.
If you get into racing bikes, it really doesn't take much for bits to break.
I've ridden mountain bikes with hydraulic brakes, and racing bikes with those tiny blocks. Whilst you definitely stop faster with the former, I didn't have any issues with the racing bike brakes, so I'd imagine that the brakes on these should be fine.
I admire the guy trying to make this concept into a product, though they ultimately may be to the bike world as IKEA is to furniture (accessible but unfortunately hugely disposable)
I recently had my mid '70s early '80s junk steel frame bike stolen from the parking structure beneath my condo. I wondered why someone bothered; I mean, when I put the bike away it had two flat tires and badly needed a tune-up; And it was stolen from a bike rack that was packed with mostly better-looking bikes.
I mean, two flat tires; it's not like they were just looking for a quick ride to the liquor store.
But yeah, there is value to a cheap bike I could pull off the rack and just use, something easier to get working than a used bike. (speaking of, I'm looking for another <$100 steel-frame bike if anyone is getting rid of something.)
I would like to know how durable this bike is, and how much energy is saved by using recycled cardboard versus a metal sourced by mining.
I see the cost/benefit argument, sure. But then again, thieves come in all stripes.
I've seen plenty of old worthless bikes lying destroyed by vandals, sometimes still chained to a fence.