Entrepreneur manufactures eco-friendly bicycles

UGANDAN entrepreneur Kasoma Noordin combined his passion for bicycles and positively contributing to his environment by crafting highend bicycle frames from bamboo.

Noordin is the founder of Boogaali Bikes in Uganda, to which he has dedicated his life to building affordable and sustainable transportation using bamboo instead of the more popular builds, which use carbon or metal.

While bamboo is known to be strong, durable and better for the environment and grows in abundance in Uganda, Noordin opted to grow the material himself.

“Bamboo may be nature's perfect plant. Strong, light and durable, it can be used to create a wide variety of functional and beautiful products,” Noordin said on the company’s website. “It is all natural and easily renewable, and it helps promote an environmentally friendly and healthy lifestyle.”

Noordin added that every renewable bamboo bicycle on the road reduces the number of vehicles clogging our crowded roadways, which helps improve air quality for everyone.

Before taking the leap into launching the business several years ago, Noordin had worked as an electrician, and it was during this time that he did a two-week course on building bicycles at the Entrepreneurship Institute of Technology which sparked the idea.

What is special about using bamboo? At the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow last year, sustainability was at the core with “managing potential impacts on the environment and local community” being one of the sustainability governing principles in COP26’S bid for carbon neutrality.

And for Boogaali Bikes, it is a step ahead of the curve in trying to solve one of the environmental problems the world is having as bamboo is a natural renewable resource, and its rapid growth avoids future deforestation.

The sustainable product is 100% biodegradable which means it won’t cause serious harm to the planet and the bicycles will not take a lot of energy to manufacture and produce, such as those made from aluminium, carbon or steel.

The bamboo is harvested during the sunny season when the plant is around three years old and is strong enough to be transformed.

The bamboo then gets treated with an insecticide due to the bamboo weevils that chew it from the inside.

“We always monitor with the measuring scale after every two weeks, and then we take the records of how the bamboo is losing weight and how it’s losing the humidity,” Noordin said during an interview with the BBC.

Once ready, the bicycles are manufactured on demand as orders are all custom-designed and factor in the weight of the customer.

An additional advantage is that the frames are relatively light, weighing between 1.8 and 2.1kg. Once the order has been placed with the exact specifications, a selection takes place on which bamboo tubes will be used, as a person weighing 80kg will require a bigger diameter and bigger hole thickness to accommodate their weight.

Boogaali Bikes custom-builds road, adventure, gravel and mountain bike frames that provide a quality of ride with exceptional vibration dampening characteristics.

It takes 10 to 15 days to produce a frame, which cost in the range of $200 to $500 (R3057 to R7645).

Noordin said they tried to produce artistic pieces. While his frames sell well in Uganda and parts of East Africa, his primary market is in Europe and the US. |