Comment by daemonologist 2 days ago
A nearly all (">90%") plastic bike is interesting, and I guess if you're a plastics company that wants to create a bike it makes sense, but the end product does not seem very compelling to me. 17 kg, 1200 EUR, one size, proprietary parts, and only 50% recycled. A comparable aluminum bike beats it in every metric except maybe fatigue life(?).
Post-consumer aluminum has been in common use for wheels for ages, and some major brands (like Trek) are also transitioning their aluminum frames to use recycled material.
Pretty much. I thought that maybe this is an electric bike, in which case the weight might be OK, but no, this is unusable anywhere with hills.
As a quick reminder, metals can be recycled indefinitely. Plastic cannot, you always have to include some virgin material.
You can recycle via depolymerization (see the various plastic-to-oil conversion refineries), although that's a more expensive process than simply melting and recasting.
Reminds me of the hydrogen-powered bike from 2015, which totally made sense if your company is also a leader in hydrogen products. https://www.bikeradar.com/news/this-e-bike-is-powered-by-hyd...
"A regular e-bike battery can take several hours to charge completely, but the H2’s hydrogen cylinder requires just six minutes at a hydrogen filling station." Of course the company wanted to run the filling stations.
My first bike bought with my first salaries (about 2-3 months) just turned 20 years old. It's a basic aluminum hardtail MTB. Still going strong - I do about 2-3k kms per year.