When Penicillin was accidentally discovered in 1928 it set off a revolution of antibiotics and drastically improved our quality of life.  Bamboo has the potential to do this for the green movement, providing the same standard of living we are used to but at a much smaller cost to the environment.  Green Biz just recently did a piece on the rapidly growing nature of the bamboo market.  According to their article bamboo sequesters 4 times the amount of carbon compared to hardwoods and takes only 3 years v. 120 years to grow to a desirable size.    It also requires less water, pesticides, and fertilizer preventing harmful algal blooms like the one that causes an annual dead zone the size of Massachusetts in the Gulf of Mexico.  This is of course on top of the fact that bamboo yields 25 tons per acre whereas the items it can replace, hardwoods and cotton, yield only 10 tons and 1 ton respectively.

There is a growing problem of the growth in demand outstripping supply leading to less than sustainable farming practices in areas like Southeast Asia.  However there is vast potential that supply will catch up with demand as bamboo prices rise and farmers in bamboo friendly growing areas like the southern cotton belt switch their crops.  While bamboo has been around as a building material and food source for thousands of years its menagerie of uses is still ever expanding.  You already probably know about bamboo shirts, skirts, socks, underwear, furniture, floors, paper, sheets, towels, plates, bowls, spoons, kitchen utensils,  cleaning wipes….etc.

But what you probably haven’t heard of is the bamboo bicycle.  Produced in conjunction by bike designer Craig Calfee and a group called Zambikes, the frame is made entirely from sustainably grown bamboo and is everything the green movement loves all wrapped into one.  While Calfee’s design company already sells customizable bamboo bikes the plan is to begin to grow bamboo sustainably in Zambia and have local artisans craft them into frames and then sell them in America and turn around and reinvest the profits back into Zambike’s projects which help local Zambians help themselves by providing local entrepreneurs as well as medical professionals with bikes and carts that help them deliver goods and serve as jungle ambulances.

The potential for carbon sequestration of these bikes compared to their metal counterparts could be huge.  However no scientists have as yet looked at the issue so I have decided to pick up their slack and perform my own guestimations using as much as hard data as possible.  For the sake of transparency I’ll walk through the calculations here.  While the transportation of the bikes from Africa will emit carbon, most modern bike frames are made in China so it’s a moot issue as far as calculations go.  Assuming the Zambikes frame weighs the same as the Calfee frame this means each bike uses 6 pounds of bamboo or about 8333 bikes made per acre.  According to the National Bike Dealers Association 18.5 million bicycles were sold in the United States last year.  If these metal monsters were all replaced with bamboo it would require 2220 acres to produce all those bicycles.  At an average of 62 tons of CO₂ sequestered for every 2.4 acres of bamboo this would yield an annual 57350 tons of carbon soaked up every year.  Using EPA stats for average car pollution this would be the equivalent of taking 10,427 vehicles off the road every year!  That’s not even counting the cars the riders stopped driving because they have a new bamboo bike…

So buy a bike and help the environment while providing jobs and life saving equipment to impoverished Zambians.  You know, nothing big.  The best part is that this isn’t an item you should buy just because it makes you feel good inside.  Bamboo provides better shock absorption then the more commonly used carbon fiber and is also very crash resistant.  The bikes currently on sale by Calfee come with a full ten-year warranty.  Now if they ever make them electric powered like the bikes from my last blog post I would be in heaven.

If you are interested in bike-cations, commuting by bike, or even fixing your bike you should check out our Bicycle Adventures page in the Marketplace or our partner Adventure Cycling.  They’re a non-profit whose mission is to inspire people of all ages to travel by bicycle for fitness, fun, and self-discovery.

For more green house admissions calculations check out the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Calculator.

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