Circular Economy Showcase
Bikes
Welcome to the Bikes Circular Economy Showcase
An initiative delivered by The Rediscovery Centre in strategic partnership with the EPA.
It’s time to hop on your bike, and join us on a journey through our showcase of exciting Irish circular economy bike projects.
Cycling provides a blueprint for how the circular economy can be put into action across our society, through sharing, repairing and reusing. Through this showcase, you’ll find out how cycling is becoming more affordable and how you can get your bike to go further through repairs. We’ll also look towards the future at interesting innovations and research, including tyres made from dandelions!
Whether you have a bike already or you are looking to rent one from time-to-time, this is a one-stop-shop, pointing you towards all of the places that can serve your cycling needs.
Making bikes accessible
Re: usability
Affordable, low carbon transport is key to ensuring that the transition to sustainable communities and cities is accessible to everyone, and that we achieve our sustainable development goals.
The circular economy is making bikes accessible to all through sharing and creating a longer life for bikes at a good price.
Strategies include bike sharing schemes, reusing and repairing unwanted bikes, buying second hand, and upcycling by finding alternate uses for them.
These and other strategies are also making bikes more affordable. For example the bike to work scheme, the new Pilot Bike and E-Bike Upcycling initiative and inventive social enterprises all provide low cost or free bikes to those who need them most.
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Upcycling ingenuity
After its life as a bike, bike parts can be used for many imaginative purposes. The Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun has been upcycling old bikes into litter pickers, chairs, tables and even musical instruments.
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Route Mapper
Created by Transport for Ireland, this map makes cycling safer by finding safe cycling routes. Bike rental schemes are also included in this route mapper.
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University of Sanctuary Initiative
An Mheitheal Rothar work with the University of Sanctuary Initiative at NUI Galway to provide bikes to students who otherwise could not access the benefits of cycling
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Pilot Bike and E-Bike Upcycling Initiative
Funded by the Department of Rural & Community Development and the Department of Transport, this scheme advances bike repair through community projects which have repair and training goals, making bikes more accessible to those in low income.
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Providing bikes for refugees
Many social enterprises (see below) and bike repair shops provide second hand bikes to marginalised communities and refugees.
Bike Rental
We don’t always need to own everything! By renting bikes, we are sharing resources and cutting down how many new items and objects are needed. Bicycle sharing schemes are a great example of this - and as a small and simple activity, they can help people to think about ownership and encourage more circular behaviour.
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Limerick, Galway, Cork & (soon) Waterford
Bike rental in Limerick, Galway and Cork is provided by BikeShare.ie. Bike rental is a great example of a product as a service. Rather than focusing on owning bikes, these rental schemes allow people to get from A to B using shared bikes. Keep an eye out for BikeShare launching in Waterford in June.
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Athlone, Dublin & Mullingar
Westmeath is the most recent county to launch a new bicycle hire scheme in Mullingar and Athlone. 30 bikes are available for hire in each town. The app-based scheme is operated by an Irish company, Moby Bikes, on behalf of Westmeath County Council.
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Dublin
Dublin Bikes is a public bicycle rental scheme which has operated in Dublin city since 2009. There are currently 116 stations around the city, with 1,600 bikes accommodating 22,417,162 journeys per year.
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Cargo Bike Rental
Cargo Bike Rental pilot schemes have now been rolled out in Cork, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, Fingal and Dublin City. The pedal-assist electric cargo bikes will be available to businesses at a discounted rate of €100 per month. They can carry up to 60kg, with a battery that lasts for up to 160km.
Reusability Survey
Dutch planners identify six categories of cyclist. Each type has different needs and wants. These groups all need to be thought about individually for road safety, as they have different requirements and wishes.
Don’t forget to….
Making bikes repairable
Repairing is caring
With between 13,000 to 14,000 sold every year in bike stores across Ireland, the second hand market for bikes is thriving . Social enterprises in particular are doing an amazing job repairing bikes.
Sadly, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, as this progress towards a circular economy is slowed by the growing number of low cost new bikes that are of a poor quality and are not as easily repairable. Work needs to be done by policymakers to regulate the lifetime and repairability of these new bikes.
We also need to support the repair community. Currently, the valuable work of bike mechanics is not formally accredited or encouraged as a career path. Although, things are moving in the right direction. One of the objectives of the Pilot Bike and E-Bike Upcycling Community Services Programme (which provides upcycled bikes to marginalised, disadvantaged and low-income people) is to enhance bike repair and upcycling training.
At Rediscover Cycling, this CSP programme will help provide recognition of bike mechanic training through either certification and/or National Accredited Qualifications.
Bicycle Remanufacturing
Led by An Mheitheal Rothar, this EPA-funded Green Enterprise Project seeks to create new techniques for remanufacturing. The project will investigate ways to remove rust and repaint the bikes for an as good as new look.
This will enable An Mheitheal Rothar to stop far more bikes from becoming waste, increasing the percentages of bikes repaired and decreasing the numbers shipped offshore for carbon-intensive recycling processes.
Simultaneously, the project will design a new circular economy business model based on selling the bikes as a branded, remanufactured product. Insights on both the processes and the business model will be shared with other SMEs and social enterprises. Finally, the project will create jobs and secure even more opportunities to teach circular economy skills to our trainees, growing the base for the circular economy in the west of Ireland.
Minister Eamon Ryan & Joe O’Brien announces launch of €3 million Pilot Bike and E-Bike Upcycling Initiative in July 2021
National Bicycle Reuse Skills Training
One of five projects funded under the Pilot Bike & EBike Upcycling Initiative, the Rediscovery Centre in collaboration with Rothar, are delivering a national bicycle reuse skills training programme and model for bike upcycling social enterprises.
The project will design & deliver a bicycle mechanics training programme that will allow further development of the bicycle industry in Ireland, with direct benefits to the commercial and the bicycle recycling social enterprise model in Ireland.
As the bicycle industry is changing rapidly, the training will provide an update on existing courses to equip bike mechanics with knowledge on new designs and technologies such as carbon fibre bikes, full suspension mountain bikes and e-bikes, as well as providing soft skills such as customer service.
In addition to these training goals, the pilot will see 20% of the bikes it produces distributed for free to people who do not qualify for the existing bike to work scheme, or to those experiencing extreme poverty.
The pilot fund is administered by Pobal on behalf of the Department of Rural and Community Development as part of its Community Services Programme, with funding by the Department of Transport over a three year period.
The Role of Social Enterprise
Social Enterprises are businesses that work primarily to improve the lives of people. Their core objective is to achieve a social, societal, or environmental impact.
Social Enterprises who repair bikes do good for the wellbeing of society, for jobs, for the community, and of course for the environment. Supporting social enterprises to achieve their goals is critical to building a fair and just circular economy in Ireland.
Bike Repair Survey
The future of circular bikes
Innovations in mobility
The circular economy will drive innovation across many areas of our lives. From new models of accessing transportation to having the agency and skillset to repair bikes ourselves, our habits and mindsets will shift over time as the circular economy takes root.
However, some new innovations create new challenges for the circular transition. For example, lithium batteries in e-bikes and e-scooters may create new waste problems in the future, as the batteries are difficult to replace and have limited recycling potential currently in Ireland.
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Dandelion Rubber
The Urban Taraxagum bicycle tyre is made from dandelion rubber - reducing reliance on importing rubber material from the tropics and maximising use of a local resource. Manufactured in Germany, the tyre can be used for the production of two-wheel, passenger car or commercial vehicle tyres as well as other vehicle parts made of natural rubber.
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Gen Z and Recommerce
A recent study by Ebay highlights that Gen Z is driving real change in terms of using recommerce (selling and buying pre-owned goods) as a means of positively contributing to sustainability efforts. 80% of Gen Z surveyed had bought secondhand, while nearly one in three had sold secondhand goods online.
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E-Bikes & Right to Repair
The Right to Repair campaign was launched in September 2019, and quickly grew to over 40 organisations in16 European countries. They campaign is fighting to remove the barriers to repair products so they can last for longer, with a specific focus on e-waste. The movement is based on three principles: Good Design, Fair Access & Informed Consumers.
In March 2022, the European Parliament voted in favor of making batteries more sustainable by making them removable and replaceable, meaning that e-bike repair should be easier to repair in the future. However, there is still a long way to go, as negotiations must now take place between the Council and the Parliament on their respective positions and amendments.
