A bicycle is the most energy-efficient form of transportation on the planet – but there’s one way it can improve even more. Think pandas.
Or at least panda food. Bamboo is a completely renewable resource. It is the fastest growing plant in the world – some species can grow 48 inches in a day and reach heights over 100 feet, according to the American Bamboo Society. It releases 35 percent more oxygen than a timber forest, and is as strong as mild steel when stretched, according to the Environmental Bamboo Foundation. It can be harvested without soil erosion and grown in almost any climate, including the Pacific Northwest.
And now it’s being used to make bicycles.
While traditional bike frames are made with environmentally-damaging materials, bamboo offers a bike-centric community such as Bellingham an even more sustainable variation of the bicycle.
So I decided to build one.
Most new bikes are made from aluminum or carbon. Aluminum production emits a chemical that has up to 10,000 times the global warming potential as carbon dioxide, according to the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency.
Damaged carbon fiber bike frames are almost impossible to repair, and because of this, most are cut in half and thrown away.
Live bamboo, however, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and dead bamboo can be disposed of in a compost bin instead of a landfill.
Craig Calfee, owner of Calfee Design in Santa Cruz, Calif., was one of the first people to realize the environmental potential of bamboo in bicycles. While bamboo bikes were originally built as a publicity stunt, the company began selling them commercially in 2005 and have since been featured in publications such as Time, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times.
However, the labor-intensive building process has kept the price high on Calfee’s bamboo bicycle line. The company hand-builds their bikes using specially heat-treated bamboo connected by a hemp/Kevlar/carbon/epoxy blend. The whole process takes 35 to 40 hours. As a result, a Calfee Design bamboo frame currently sells for around $2,700.
I built mine for $160.
1. Following the Pandas
My search for local bamboo sources led me to Tom Burton, owner of Tom’s Bamboo in Blaine, Wash. Burton grows and sells his own bamboo from his home, which is easily identifiable by the 35 foot stalks peaking above his roof. During my first visit, he had me stand in the middle of a bamboo grove at night, without a flashlight, and lean back against a stalk to look at the stars. Burton’s love for bamboo, gained over 20 years working with the plant, is infectious.
"When you get the fever, you get the fever," Burton said.
Earlier, Burton had referred to bamboo as a lesson on the virtues of flexibility in life. Looking up as the grove leaned quietly with the wind, the lesson was not lost.
I was starting to get the fever.
2. New & Old
Like Calfee’s design, only the basic V-shapes of my frame would be made from bamboo. To avoid buying new parts or cutting up usable bike frames for the remaining components, I went to The Hub, a non-profit community bike shop in Bellingham. The Hub reconditions used bikes and bike parts that would otherwise sit neglected in someone’s garage or rust in a landfill.
Searching through the Hub is like sifting through a greasy antique shop – shelves holding boxes of different parts sit against the wall beneath dozens of wheels dangling from the ceiling. Franken-bikes, bikes built from the remains of unusable ones, hang from hooks or lean hopefully against kickstands, ready for purchase. Rows of other bikes brood in dark corners, waiting to be dismantled.
After an hour of rummaging and cutting up broken frames, I had the wheels, cranks and other parts that I needed to flesh out my frame, as well as a gruesome pile of bike remains. Instead of dumping it into a landfill, I was able to recycle it all at Northwest Recycling of Bellingham.
3. Tying it Together
To hold all the bamboo tubes together, I decided to use the castaway-on-a-deserted-island method, lashing the joints with strands of hemp and epoxy. Steve Dillman, a professor in the Engineering Technologies Department at Western Washington University, recommended an epoxy used for fiberglass where the hemp would replace the fiberglass fibers. After a difficult search, I found the hemp I needed through the Hempest, a local dealer of hemp clothing and accessories, and through a Portland-based fabric dealer called Aurora Silk.
4. Sticky Business
To cure their bamboo, Calfee Design smokes it for 12 days in a specially designed smoke-room, saturating it with carbon from the smoke to give it maximum strength. I wanted mine faster, so I used a propane blowtorch instead.
The green bamboo, spitting and steaming under the flame and smelling strangely like sweet potatoes, went from tan to a beautiful teak as it dried out. I leaned all my weight onto it to test it. It didn’t even budge.
After cutting the tubes to length with a hacksaw, fitting the pieces together required only a fresh file and a lot of skinned, bloody knuckles. The ends of each tube had to be roughened with a rasp to give the hemp something to grab onto, and after eight hours of filing, cutting and rasping in my brother’s basement, my forearms were completely useless – but the bike tubes were ready to go.
Before permanently setting the frame with the hemp and epoxy, I used superglue to temporarily put it together. This would guarantee there would be no problems with its shape, but to my frustration, there was–the rear wheel rubbed against both surrounding tubes. Adjusting the wheel didn’t fix it, nor did pulling the tubes apart. The stubborn frame was moments from a ghastly and unspeakable demise when I realized I could just snap the glue and reset the tubes.
To my delight, the frame turned out beautiful. But it wasn’t finished until the joints were lashed together with the hemp and epoxy.
As soon as the epoxy touched the hemp, madness broke loose. Imagine brushing long, blonde hair with a dead pine bough full of sap. The hemp tangled and stuck to everything it touched, including my clothes, the epoxy bottles and anything that came within 10 feet of the mess. But after four hours of applying the goo to the joints and one night for the epoxy to cure, the frame was done. Fitting the rest of the parts required four files, six hours of filing and another devastating forearm workout.
After 90 hours, $160, six files, two hacksaw blades and countless curse words, the bike was ready to ride.
My stomach sat in my throat and my hands shook nervously with excitement as I pushed it into the alley behind my brother’s house. This first ride could go perfectly – or it could end horrifically with compound fractures and massive brain trauma.
I put my feet in the pedals, took a deep breath and shifted all my weight onto the bike.
Instead of an explosion of bamboo shards, I was pedaling a stable bicycle. I took it down the alley, then Magnolia Street and then Samish Way. With each mile I went faster, blasting through gravel and rough concrete and jamming over speed bumps. It rode smoother than any aluminum or carbon bike I had ever ridden, absorbing the vibrations of gnarly sections of road and the jolts of cracks in concrete.
The bike is still far from perfect. It looks like a cave man built it. The front wheel only turns 45 degrees in either direction, making sharp corners terrifying. The alignment is off and the bamboo handlebars broke immediately, nearly killing me.
But that’s not the point.
It is completely ride-able and built with materials that are for the most part sustainable. If someone who has never even thought of building a bike before can do it in two weeks, using no special tools, then there’s serious potential here, especially in a community as environmentally conscious as Bellingham.
Calfee also sees this potential. He is currently working on a project in Ghana where he is teaching Africans to build bikes from local bamboo that could provide reliable and inexpensive transportation as well as a profitable export to bring money into the area. Calfee says that this could also lower the cost in the United States and bring affordable, sustainable bamboo bikes to mainstream markets like Bellingham.
Sakeus Bankson studies environmental journalism. This is his first published piece.