| Bamboo Bikes: Eco-Friendly Material and Award-Winning Design |
| Sunday, 08 August 2010 | Victoria Cho | Article |
|
California-based bike company Calfee Design sells bamboo bike frames suitable for normal use, mountain biking and racing. They come with a 10-year warranty, are crash tolerant and provide a much smoother and more comfortable ride than their steel counterparts due to the material’s excellent shock-absorption quality. Weighing in at a mere four to six pounds, the design has received awards such as Best Road Bike, Best Off-Road Bike, and Peoples' Choice Award at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show. The bike is stylish as well. With its sleek, glossy tubing, it snatched first place in the open class at the Great Western Bicycle Rally's Concourse d'Elegance show. Each frame is built to order. The company selects tubes based on the rider’s weight and offers its standard Pro, Tri or Cross models along with custom or mountain-bike models. The $3,000 price tag doesn’t deter customers; in fact, Calfee has sold enough bikes to launch sustainable bike projects in developing nations. In addition to deriving from a natural material, the model doesn’t require any electricity to be built and produces much less carbon emissions than other model types during its production. Bamboo is also available or easily grown in tropical nations desperately in need of additional means of transportation and employment opportunities. Company founder Craig Calfee immediately recognized the bike’s potential in developing nations and traveled to Ghana, where he introduced the bikes and organized bike-building workshops. Under his Bamboosero label, he helped establish two local businesses currently taking orders. Calfee expanded his project to Zambia, Mexico and Uganda and has plans for further expansion in the Philippines, Cambodia and El Salvador. Light, strong and sustainable--with these attributes, bamboo may just be the perfect material from which to build a bike. Additional resources: Updated 8/8/10; originally posted 8/21/09. Comments
(2)
Written by MP , August 22, 2009
Great story! Not only is this an ingenious idea--Calfee is sharing it with people who can use practical transportation. It's a solution that meets people where they are and takes them somewhere, in a way that considers the future of people and the planet.
Report abuse
|
As one of the world’s strongest natural materials, bamboo has been used to build houses, boats and furniture, not to mention hats, toys, musical instruments and 
Show/Hide comments
Regards
Rick