Green shoots for bamboo cyclists

With frames stronger than steel and natural in-built suspension due to the “give” of the raw material, some experts think the new mountain bikes could be the next must-have top end product for cycling enthusiasts. With a starting price of £1,750, however, they may remain a relatively rare sight.

RAW, a new company based in Yorkshire, has created the UK’s first bamboo bike and has signed an agreement with Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative to launch its bikes exclusively in their stores. They will be on sale in Scotland before the end of the year at shops in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

They will be made from bamboo imported from China, where the plant grows by up to one metre a day, requires minimal pesticides and produces lots of oxygen. It will not require the energy-intensive manufacturing processes - such as forging and welding - involved with building bicycles out of metal. Hemp fibre is used to bind the frame together.

Ged Holmyard, communications officer for the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative, said the retailer was excited about the “innovative” new bikes, not least due to their green credentials.

“Bamboo is one of the most renewable resources in the world,” he said. “Although bikes have a fantastically-low carbon footprint compared to other forms of transport there’s no harm in taking it to the next degree.

“As well as that, we think the bikes look amazing. The frames are head-turning. To get a bike made of a different material is always interesting, just like when we first saw carbon fibre bikes in the 1990s. Now they totally dominate the top end of the market.”

The shop chain’s test riders were impressed by the comfort of the bikes since due to the nature of bamboo there is a vertical spring in the frame that does not exist in metal alternatives. And in terms of strength, the bamboo frames have been shown to outperform steel, meaning they could respond well to being bashed and battered on a mountain bike course. They comply with the same British and European safety standards applied to conventional metal bikes.

“I’m not going to stick my neck out and say bamboo bikes are going to take over the world, but I find it refreshing that there’s still innovation in our industry,” Holmyard added.

Rachel Hammond, managing director of RAW, said the bamboo bike would not be sold on the grounds of its environmental credentials but instead as a high-performance bike. As soon as she set eyes on a model she thought it was “so beautiful” and now does not ride anything else.

Bamboo bikes are already made by several companies in America and RAW’s version has been designed in conjunction with engineers at Oxford Brooks University.

“It’s very vibration absorbing so it’s a very smooth and comfortable ride,” said Hammond, who believes buyers will be serious cyclists who probably already have one or two other models.

“It’s not for people who go to a shop to spend £100 on a bike,” she said.

David Sewell, of website Bike Bamboo, who imports £3,500 bamboo road bikes from America, said: “They are works of art as well as a bicycle. I think people buy them because of their beauty as well as their function.”

He thinks the ideal buyer is “a little bit quirky and quite wealthy”.

Sewell said the concept was not new as bamboo bikes used to be produced in Britain in the 19th century, by the Bamboo Cycle Company in Wolverhampton.

“At the turn of the century they were mass produced here and everyone was buying them. Then new fashions took over,” he explained.

Not everyone thinks they are the future. Damian Jones, cycle mechanic at The Hub mountain bike centre in Glentress Forest, near Peebles, said he “laughed” when he read about them in a specialist cycling magazine.

“In theory bamboo’s stronger than steel but we live in a very wet climate and, in my opinion, water will get in however much they treat it and then they will break. I certainly wouldn’t put my money into one. It will be an elitist bunch that buys them. You get people who are more like bike collectors and it will be more of a novelty item. I have seen these things come and go before.”