It’s hard to gather massive data about how careful or careless our industry is with waste.  A lot of manufacturers take transparent sustainability pledges, but a lot more don’t. Bike shops, on the other hand, have open doors. So, Travis surveyed several dozen bike shop recycling programs (and got a few dozen responses) about how their waste is managed. Answers ranged from recycling to donations to landfills to something involving art projects and Burning Man.

Like all industries, the production and sale of bikes, components, and apparel creates significant amounts of waste. Some of the leftover raw material after manufacturing can not—or will not—be recycled. Same with some of the packaging when products are shipped to distributors, or when they’re shipped again to retailers or customers. Then in the end, there’s what’s to be done with equipment that has finally outlived its usefulness. All while engines are rumbling in the background to keep everything moving.

That’s why the topics of recyclable materials and packaging are so complicated. They’re only part of the equation, and a part that can fall through the cracks at so many points in a product’s long journey. Metal recycling may be a literally well-oiled machine in the early stages of production, feeding chips and swarf and odds and ends back into the furnace. But as recycling gets less convenient down the line, it’s more likely to be ignored.

Brands could potentially mandate that all discarded steel, aluminum, plastic, and cardboard gets recycled after leaving the factory, or the distribution center, or the assembly plant. And plenty of them do, and also take other sustainability measures that might earn them B-Corp, GRI, or Blue Sign certification. If we can assume that the recycling is actually happening (which is a whole other story), this sort of policy could help limit waste. But again, those are a lot of holes to plug. I’d love to find out exactly how much recycling is going on during every step of the way. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about factories, distributors, or assemblers. I just know about bike shops.

I worked in shops for nearly twenty years, and each shop handled recycling a little differently. On one end of the spectrum, I had a conscientious boss who personally cut down all the cardboard to fit in our small paper recycling dumpster. And he made bi-monthly trips to the scrap yard to drop off milk crates full of old cranks and derailleurs. On the other end of the spectrum was a shop whose recycling efforts amounted to piling cardboard outside the back door to be picked up rather selectively by a guy with an old Tacoma.  It got me wondering what was happening elsewhere. So, I came up with eight multiple-choice questions about how various types of waste are managed, and I started emailing.

I sent a survey via Google Forms out to 150 various-sized commercial bike shops in various-sized cities around the country … and I heard back from 32 of them. Not bad, I guess. It was enough to allow a trend or two to emerge in every topic. Each question centered on a major category of non-electronic solid waste: Cardboard, plastics, aluminum, steel, rubber, carbon fiber, complex components, and complete bikes.

I based that list on on the waste I primarily dealt with during my shop years. That’s also how I came up with the defined answer options I provided, which included things like leaving stuff out for regular recycling pickup, dropping stuff off at a scrap yard, or donating to a local nonprofit or co-op. Speaking of which, shout out to LA’s Bicycle Kitchen, who let me come in on a busy Saturday and take these photos of things that they’re helping give a second life.

I also included a customizable “Other.” Full disclosure, if I determined that any of those “Other” responses actually fit better into one of my defined answers, I folded them into that category for clarity’s sake. I also combined a few other “Other” answers that were very similar. I’m just mentioning that in case you’re one of the shops who helped me with the survey, but you aren’t seeing your very specific answer about discarded bikes that end up at Burning Man.

Plastic, Aluminum, and Glass Containers

I reckon that a significant portion of recyclable consumer plastic, aluminum, and glass that goes through bike shops takes the form of beverage containers. But tire sealant, lubricants, and blister-packed products are definitely in the mix. It was encouraging to see that this was the most universally recycled material I mentioned in the survey.

Paper and Cardboard

There is a huge amount of cardboard in the bike industry. And I’d say there’s more than ever, now that mail-order shopping has expanded well beyond Nashbar, and consumer-direct bikes are sent in elegantly overbuilt puzzle boxes. One shop reached out to add that the packaging they needed help with was closed-cell foam, which is often used to protect frame tubes in shipping. But a lot of brands just use more cardboard for this, so it’s a major component of bike-industry waste. Thankfully, it’s one of the second-most widely recycled material I asked about.

100% Aluminum Components or Frames

Here’s where things started to get interesting. Some municipal recyclers won’t take big chunks of aluminum, which is why so few shops are able to treat it like they do the rest of their easily recycled aluminum waste. A larger percentage of shops handled it like one of my old shops, where a local made the rounds to various mechanics-oriented businesses and took what they could give. Here’s also where I started to see a couple shops mention people collecting them for crafting projects. I can’t imagine that being what happens “most of the time,” but maybe they’re in a particularly crafty area of the country.

100% Steel Components or Frames

Steel is less valuable per-pound than aluminum to recycle, and nowadays, tends to be slightly less common in bicycles. At least when it comes to simple one-piece components like handlebars and crank arms. But the same shops that are taking their aluminum to the scrap yard are taking the steel with it. Might as well, I guess. And there were some technicalities in shops’ responses about what local roaming scrap collectors were interested in, but on the aggregate, it seems these community members are equal-opportunity collectors.

Multi-Material Components

Before I trimmed my first draft of this survey to a less daunting length, this one question was split into two. I asked shops to specify whether they salvaged hubs and brakes and stuff for usable bits and bobs. A few of the “Other” responses mentioned they did scavenge a part before giving up on it.  But these results are about what they did with the carcasses left over. Understandably, some raw-material scrappers might not want the trouble of separating steel springs out of aluminum derailleurs. This category results included a lot of crafting collectors, but they also showed a high number of shops who have no better option for these parts than the trash. To be fair, these tend to be relatively small-volume items.

 

Complete Bikes

This complete-bike question was actually three questions in my first draft, touching both on parts-salvaging as well as how frequently this even happens. Regardless of how often they salvage parts, if ever, there’s very often a nonprofit willing to do the work to pull together a working bike out of multiple non-working ones. Glad to see how common this was in the results.

 

Carbon Fiber Components or Frames

Although carbon waste is a hot topic, I think this doesn’t paint a clear picture. And not because there is a lot of pre-consumer waste in carbon. That’s not what this survey is about. The volume (and mass) of dead carbon is not likely to be as significant as that of cardboard, plastic, steel, aluminum, or especially rubber. Take with a grain of salt the fact that this survey found over 90% of dead carbon that goes through bike shops ends up at a landfill. It’s worth mentioning that this is the only material that was so rare for one shop to dispose of that they actually gave me the answer, “N/A.” Still, there’s enormous room for improvement here.

 

Tires and Inner Tubes

But you could argue that tires and tubes are a bigger problem. That’s why Schwalbe’s recycling initiatives are so important. It may be better now in the era of tubeless and Tannus, but I remember the piles of butyl rubber that ended up in the dumpster twice a week at my last shop. There are upcycling opportunities, and some are on a relatively large scale, but not as large as the rubber flow in the bike industry. Kudos to shops who are finding ways around it, but these numbers seem to indicate this is a hard problem to solve.

If you work at a shop that I missed, let us know in the comments if you’ve found any unique, effective, or simple ways to deal with waste at your business.