Fully recyclable kids bike a first
A Wellington bike company is launching the world’s first fully recyclable children’s bike made of PP, or number five plastic.
Wishbone Design ran trials for more than a year with recycled PP to see if bikes could be made without glass fibre reinforcement. Adding glass fibre strengthened the bikes, but meant that they could not be recycled at kerbside.
Wishbone Design executive director Jennifer McIver said the new model, called the RE2, would be ‘‘infinitely recyclable’’, because it did not contain the glass fibre.
Made from two-thirds recycled polypropylene or PP plastic, and one-third recycled nylon carpets, the RE2 Raw model has no additives like pigments, glass fibre, fillers or talc, she said. This is what allows it to be recycled again and again.
‘‘We believe this is the greenest bike ever made,’’ McIver said.
Wishbone has launched the bike alongside Gen Less, the new campaign from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA). Gen Less aims to get individuals and businesses to make changes to reduce their emissions.
Because the bike is fully recyclable, Wishbone will offer a take-back scheme to recycle it on behalf of customers.
EECA chief executive Andrew Caseley said Gen Less did not audit organisations on their carbon credentials, and each organisation would have to substantiate its environmental claims to its customers.
However, he said the work Wishbone had done to reduce its carbon footprint was the sort of thing the EECA wanted to see more businesses doing.
Gen Less was focusing on getting people and organisations to use less energy but also to look at characteristics like product longevity, how things were made and whether or not products could be reused or reformed in the future, Caseley said.
McIver said, longer term, the plan was for Wishbone to source PP plastic from New Zealand’s own waste streams and increase the existing demand for PP plastic. New Zealand currently imports virgin plastics, including PP.
Councils and industry were moving on the issue of recycling the country’s plastic waste, McIver said.
She thought it would be possible to purchase New Zealand recycled PP plastic by 2021.