Bamboo Or Carbon Fiber: Are Those The Choices?

Bicycles are made either from carbon fiber or bamboo.

At least, if I didn't know any better, that's what I would think after reading an article on The Huffington Post website.

It's one thing for a journalist to be ignorant about a subject before writing about it.  But Tom Levitt, the author of the article in question, seems to have committed a cardinal sin (Well, at least I've always thought it was a cardinal sin!) for a journalist:  not doing his research.

Also, he seems not to know what he is trying to tell his readers.  It would have been fine if he'd stuck to writing a feature piece about the London club whose workshop teaches people how to build frames from bamboo.  That part of the article is interesting enough, at least to me.  I wouldn't even have minded if he'd written about the environmental damage caused by the manufacture or disposal of carbon fiber, or of bicycles generally.  

A class in the Bamboo Bicycle Club's workshop.

But the premise of his article seems to be that teaching people how to make their own bamboo bicycles is a way to mitigate the environmental damage caused by disposing of bicycles.  That, itself, would have been all right if he hadn't conflated the making or recycling of carbon fiber bikes with the making or recycling of bikes generally. 

What's all the more perplexing is that the article includes this photo of share bikes dumped in Shanghai, China.  Again, exposing the environmental damage and sheer waste of such a practice would have been valid.  With my knowledge of bicycles, however, I would say that few, if any, of those bikes are carbon fiber.  Most, I would reckon, are mild to mid-grade steel.  

Why is that important?  Well, steel can be recycled many times without losing strength or other qualities that make it a good structural material.  That is one reason why it's the most-recycled metal.  Not far behind steel in that category is--you guessed it--aluminum.  If any of the bikes in that photo aren't made of steel, they're probably aluminum, which loses little when it's re-used.

On the other hand, carbon fiber is recycled by chopping it to bits and burning off the plastic resin that holds the fibers--which lose significant amounts of their strength in the process--together.  Of course the loss of strength is a concern to bike-makers, but it's even more of a problem in the aerospace industry, where use of carbon fiber has expanded even more than in it has in the bicycle industry.

Carbon fiber use is also expanding more rapidly in the automotive industry, which also might not want to use materials weakened by recycling.  And, for all of the carbon fiber bicycles, boats, gliders, tennis rackets and such available to consumers, the military is still, by far, the biggest user of carbon fiber composites.   Let's just say that the armed forces aren't noted for their concern about the environment, much less recycling.  Moreover, armed forces are willing and able to spend whatever is necessary to obtain the most advanced composites, so they wouldn't be interested in recycled materials.

So...If Tom Levitt had stuck to one topic--bike-building classes, bamboo bikes or the environmental hazards of carbon fiber--he might have written a lucid and enlightening article.  Instead, he has revealed his ignorance or laziness. 

The CPSC Is Recalling 1.5 Million Bicycles Because....

All right.  I'm going to begin today's post with another "Which is worse?" question.  The difference is, this "Which is worse" question will have three choices.

Here goes...

Which is worse: 

• a technical "innovation" that's superfluous,
• someone who doesn't know to use it safely, or 
• some government bureaucrat who doesn't know the difference?

That question entered my mind when I learned of a recall involving bicycles from thirteen different manufacturers.  

The 1.5 million bikes in question have front disc brakes.   As "The Retrogrouch" and others have said, very few cyclists actually benefit from, let alone need,  disc brakes.  

To be fair, I will point out that, although the recall was announced as one involving "bicycles with front disc brakes", the brakes themselves were not the problem.

So why the recall?, you ask. 


According to the US Consumer Products Safety Commission, which ordered the recall, when the bicycle is ridden with the quick-release lever in the fully-open position, the lever is only 6mm (or, as the CPSC notes, the width of a number 2 pencil) between the lever and the brake rotor.   

I'll run that by you again:  If you ride one of those bikes with the front wheel's quick-release lever fully opened, the lever is too close to the brake rotor.

Now, if you're going to ride a bike with quick release levers, you should know how to open and close them, and you should know enough not to ride with them open.  Forget about whether you have disc brakes: If your quick release is open, your wheel can slide or fall out from under you when you turn or hit a bump.  Or the lever can get snagged in your spokes--or, if you have a disc brake, on the rotor.

That last scenario is what prompted the recall.  Three incidents of it were reported to the CPSC.  When the lever came into contact with the rotor, the wheel came to a sudden stop or fell out of the bicycle.  One of those incidents resulted in injury.

So, because someone who doesn't know how to use a quick release got hurt, 1.5 million bicycles are being recalled.   That's good, sound judgment from the CPSC, isn't it?

Here's how you can tell if your bike is part of the recall:



 

Cyclists Cause Pollution

I hate to break this to all of you "tree-huggers":  We are polluting the air, after all, when we ride our bicycles.

Oh, but it gets worse:  the more and harder we ride, the more we fill the atmosphere with a toxin--namely, carbon dioxide.

From The Ottawa Citizen

Now, I'll admit that I haven't taken a science class since, well, before some of you were born.  But the notion that we are fouling the air when we pedal and puff is at least factually and etymologically true--at least in the same sense as another statement made by no less of an environmental scientist than Ronald Reagan.  Back in 1981, he said, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."

Would you expect any less from the man who appointed James G. Watt as his Secretary of the Interior?  

Apparently, Washington State Representative Ed Orcutt learned his science from Professor Ronnie.  Hey, if I had science professors like him, I'd be nominated for a Nobel Prize.  In what, I don't know.

But I digress.  The Hon. Rep. Orcutt revealed his epoch-making discovery about cyclists to a bike shop owner during a campaign for a proposal to charge a $25 fee on bicycles costing more than $500.  That fee would help to pay for transportation facilities.  

Orcutt has since apologized for his remarks.  However, the furor over his remarks remains.

For me, learning of this story has had at least one good outcome: I found it on the BicycleLaw.com webpage.  I'll be visiting it from now on.