The duo returns for the 13th episode of “The Fiber Side Chats”. On this Earth Day, they re-open a current industry discussion regarding the environmental ethics surrounding both Carbon Fiber and Aluminum from production to end-of-life. The side they choose might surprise you! Don’t miss this one.
Specialized / Duke University Study:
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/8483/Duke_MP_Published.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Dan: 00:00 So we’re back with the 13th episode of the fiber side chats for today’s episode. We wanted to stray a little bit from the more interview style that we have been developing recently. We’ve been doing a lot of inner been doing a lot of interviews and we wanted to take on a subject that has been really popular in the bike industry conversationally the past couple of years, really
Shawn: 00:28 past six months. It’s come up over and over and over on different media.
Dan: 00:32 Yeah, over and over and over again. And what we’re talking about, what we’re referencing is the discussion of the relationship between carbon fiber and the aluminum and which one is more ethical, which one is, which one is more environmentally ethical, which one is better for the planet, which one has a longer life cycle, et cetera. So we wanted to throw our hats into the ring part of the conversation. Obviously we. This will be no shock to you that we are on the side of. We think carbon is actually better, more environmentally ethical in the long run. That’s what we’re going to try and prove today and we’ll explain why throughout the course of the podcast. We want to start by saying that we do think there’s a bit of marketing weight being put on both sides. Um, I don’t think that anybody who is involved in this discussion so far would shy away from that. I think it’s also been admitted by a couple of players that everything is marketing
Shawn: 01:36 referencing is. There’s a couple articles on outside magazine, put a story out the Guardian, put a story out how they can post, put a story out, and then they all kind of started from this company called pull bicycles in Finland and they came out with a very strong article on pinkbike talking about why they’re ditching their plastic project. Right. And what it started from there.
Dan: 02:02 Yeah. Why are they pitching their plastic project? What was there?
Shawn: 02:07 Well, a little bit of background there. A mountain bike company down enduro downhill. Only bigger mountain bikes out of Finland. Developed a new linkage system. Yeah. Do alternate linkage. I’m super long wheel base. Yeah, but they’re all on aluminum and he was exploring this guy, Leo is owner was exploring the idea of going to carbon for the obvious even brings up is obvious reason. That’s what people want to buy, makes it stiffer, mixed lighter Cetera, et Cetera, et cetera. All the reasons why people buy carbon, right? Stronger, stiffer, lighter, faster and faster. You can do better, easier shapes do right or more complex shapes in both sides and his big story sprung up because he started designing a bike. It sounds like he doesn’t know anything about current. That’s mine. That’s my first kind of cynical, skeptical viewpoint of he doesn’t seem to know. He hired master student from the local university to do probably the cad modeling and he got on an airplane and went to China.
Dan: 03:06 The first thing that was kind of shocking to us is when he did this, this is coming from the story. He said that he went to the Chinese factories and didn’t realize everything was hand laded credibly shocking. That which was shocking to me. It’s like, how do you not? That’s what’s crazy about carbon and that’s why it’s so hard to work with is everything has to be handled
Shawn: 03:30 right. And he was shocked at the human labor involved and how unethical that was to make people work with their hands essentially, which I don’t know, that’s
Dan: 03:40 for us, that we’re all for automation and you know, but still like it’s shocking, right
Shawn: 03:48 little and jumped in fully before he tears it. Never. So that was a red flag to me.
Dan: 03:55 Do you also kind of guy after our own heart? We love jumping into things that we don’t fully know yet at first. So a lot of background information. True. True of an engineering degree, right? So it’s not totally. No, no, I, um, but that was surprising to us basically
Shawn: 04:12 to a port city in China called Dongguan. I think it’s that city is one of the big bike city producing cities in China. It’s, I’m on the southeast coast, not far from Taiwan. Huge, huge manufacturing city, a lot of carbon, lot of bikes. So the next thing he alludes to, he visits a factory and he’s shocked at loan everything at this point. People weighing carbon up by hand obviously was shocking for him. The air quality over there, you said he went for a ride.
Dan: 04:44 It’s an easy ride
Shawn: 04:45 right up the hill. It’s super hilly mean it’s like mountain hilly and how bad the air quality was and that’s definitely a thing. I mean it is one of the biggest manufacturing cities in the world. It’s got terrible air quality. That’s a known fact. I totally agree with him that there’s a lot that we can do to help the world, you know, we’re environmentalists as well, you know, air quality.
Dan: 05:07 Yeah. And, but one of the things that I thought was amazing and kind of a counterpoint to his argument is, you know, he kept bringing up all the coal, coal-fired power plants are, you know, it was all coal residue in the air. Right, right, right. Which makes sense, but does,
Shawn: 05:24 I mean most of the, you know, I was just in South Korea, they also use a ton of coal. That part of Asia does, is their primary power and they’re transitioning out of it because boy Cole kills your air quality. You know, I told you how I had a hard time breathing in Seoul and it was fine. It wasn’t like I was choking or anything and just like basic game, you felt like it really bad allergies and it’s all, you know, the energy demands in those countries are so fast and they have a lot of coal. It takes a lot of time and technology to, to build a solar panel. Right, right. Versus cold when you just dig it out and light it on fire to simplify it. So there’s a lot of coal burning to produce the massive amount of energy that manufacturing city.
Dan: 06:04 Yeah. But today we did a little investigation into the air quality of the city that he left. He went to in China versus La
Shawn: 06:15 Right now it’s the same as that law, but it’s also the middle of the night there. So it does probably get worse during the day. It does get worse during the day and then you get, you know, two to three times worse. And yeah, I totally agree that not good for people to breathe. Right now they’re at a level 63, but it’s also 1230 in the morning. Then you can look at their predictions and you can see what they’re gonna expect it to be. You know, if you go back 20 years to before plastic clean air act was terrible. New York was terrible. There is smaller on the cities and the goal is we keep elevating the world to clean up. Big One that’s going on over there is nitrogen dioxide, which is combustion gases, cars. That’s kind of their big pollutant. Which is too bad. Yeah. It brings up all those points. It’s hard to breathe. How can anybody live like this in Finland? Everything is perfect. Kind of the stereotype of all Scandinavia. Yeah, he definitely. But yet again, I think he was so shocked by everything you know, and it’s like his first Rodeo into bike making. Yeah. It was kind of surprising. Yeah. I was like alright, born yesterday.
Dan: 07:22 So our next quit our, our, our next question I’m going along is like, well did, what was the level of factory that they chose to go see now in the article, in the pink bike article, they asked them the question directly is, you know, did you go to a manufacturing plant that wasn’t doing a good job? And they were saying that they hate wasting time on low end processes and the factory that they chose was making many big brands in the industry,
Shawn: 07:53 right? I tried to kind of figure out who’s in Dunhuang and it’s everybody, it’s everybody, you know, I’m trying to think of what factories going to. And there’s every everything over there, right? You have every flavor of advanced carbon to a manufacturing going on. And um, so he just kind of implicates that he only chose the best graded, the greatest, the best. Nobody’s chosen a better company than he did.
Dan: 08:19 Right? And this is kind of one of the, this is one of the first, how do we say, our points of argument that doesn’t line up is because then he goes on to say the factory was clean and the workers looked relatively happy. The only thing they didn’t do professionally was the recycling.
Shawn: 08:36 Right. And then you have carbon fiber, carbon fiber with that factory. Right? Correct. Well, and his other. And that’s kind of an interesting topic. Like you know what kind of leading into the story a lot in comments everywhere. Every, every recycling is a new thing, right? Not everybody’s doing it yet. It’s not easy to do yet. There’s just gonna be some East Coast based company down in California. And the reason why they’re in all these locations is there. Following the aerospace industry, you know, the bike industry or the outdoor industry sector alone uses nine percent of total carpet fiber usage. Peanuts. I guess what’s the common phrases that people say that the amount of carbon in the cycling industry is one wing on. Oh, it’s the product manager from trucks. I don’t know what articles on Huffington Post. Yeah, product manager tracks that there is more carbon in a 7:47 or [inaudible] wing.
Shawn: 09:30 Then there’s then there, then a bike line of theirs for a year, and that’s super true. Most of that airplane weight also weighed by hand. So recycling is complicated. It’s such a new material, you know? Yes. We do live in a modern era. Recycling, you should think about end of life cycle. And his big comment was aluminum is forever recyclable and in a sense that’s true. I don’t know if Finland does with its recycling, but right now in the US we export most of our recycling because we don’t have the power or facilities to do it nor do we actually want it. Sometimes it’s cheaper just to, you know, we’re buying a lot of raw material with exception of all these new steel and aluminum terrorists from other countries and we’re sending them our recycling, their recycle it and send it back to us because it’s easier for us to not do that step of the process.
Shawn: 10:19 Anyway. So in concept aluminum recycling is forever, but in real practice it’s difficult, super difficult and not likely. And not likely. And also aluminum recycling. Yes, it’s good for the longevity of the material, but it’s also not the greatest for the environment. No, I mean there’s any recycling process is incredibly energy intensive. There’s a reason we haven’t been doing it here and it’s because it’s pretty hard for. It’s pretty hard on the environment as well. Well, it’s gross and the hard part is is you always got to do your costs, your risk benefit analysis of being like, all right, do you have to put in 99 percent of the energy to get 100 percent of the goods back versus raw material? Not Saying we should go to keep digging up the ground, but that’s the cost trade off, right? Carbon you basically, you see the way you recycle it is you turn it into a different product.
Shawn: 11:12 So it Kinda gets, I don’t know if recycling, is that really the right term for that process? I call it like ups, I don’t even call it an upcycling being down cycling. So let’s say you take your super high end road bike or your airplane wing and you turn it into a lesser product like a park bench, something that’s not as critical. I don’t mean western any other way, but like a something where the structural strength and rigidity doesn’t have to be as high as it would be total for a performance audits to use it in reinforced plastics or another interesting sector that I saw yesterday that I used to work in a little bit as well as re concrete reinforcement. So they’re using chopped up carbon pieces. All concrete fills one of the best ways to get rid of a product because you’re just locked it into something for 30 years and it makes, you know, an x like rebar that point.
Shawn: 12:01 So it makes it significantly stronger. That’s not there yet. We’re getting there. And what’s cool, we’re in this era of when carbon recycling is really starting to take off, it’s still not easy. It’s not easy for any bike company to do it. I know it’s not, um, we get asked it all the time. It’s not easy, you know, we have to pay to get it recycled, which is fine, and you pay to get your curb recycling picked up technically and that is kind of the ethical thing to do so I don’t know the recycling thing. I get what he’s saying that he goes off on a little bit of a tyrant that carbon’s not recyclable and then he tries to answer that back. A lot of the comments and people like it’s totally recyclable, dude. I would say more with him on the sense that it’s more difficult to recycle facilities aren’t there yet, which it is. We agree with that. Yeah, but we also agree that, you know, they’re signaling anything is difficult. You know, we can’t even recycle your yogurt containers technically in a lot of cities.
Shawn: 12:57 A little bit more on the recycling thing before we move off of it. What’s the process like for recycling carbon? For our, for our listeners who may not understand that everyone’s a little different. So there’s two types of carbon recycling that gets talked about. There is what’s known as your cutoff recycling. We were talking about this yesterday a little bit where let’s say you’re making a bike last feet, let’s say, let’s simplify something. Let’s say you’re making a dress or an out of a piece of fabric. You go to the fabric store and you buy a bolt, you know it’s a big flat sheet of fabric, three feet by four feet. You trace your pattern on it, you’re not using the entire sheet. So now you have all the remainder and that’s kind of the cutoff recycling. So that material typically is still good. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Shawn: 13:44 It’s short in some weird shaped and the way in carbons is the same way. So what they do, and there’s that company in Port Angeles, Washington, they partner with Boeing. They take their cut offs just like the bottoms of your pants and turned it into a park bench. You like the, like that. You didn’t see that coming up. They take the cut offs and they’ll hear them into an object. So they’re using the remainder. It’s like using access remainder carpet. Um, that’s pretty interesting. That’s super useful. Track does the same with their company. And the east coast, the carbon steel better when we interviewed, we are one day they’re saving their cutoffs that are small company and they’re going to hopefully turned it in some other smaller products. The carbon still good. Um, it’s just in a weird shape, you know, the weird triangle and can you cut a small rectangle out of that triangle, then you have some more, you know, you keep diminishing your waste.
Shawn: 14:40 And so these companies are taking all of the scraps and you said they’re requiring them somehow somehow, you know, some are kind of expired, but they’ll still do some kind of cure yet again, that’s why it isn’t like park benches or as an island injecting isn’t additive rather than. Yeah, as the primary reinforcement and it’s totally fine. So that’s one style of something that gets thrown under the recycling umbrella. A little different. I don’t really call that recycling technically, but I don’t know what I would call it. I don’t either. Waste Management, I guess, you know, repurposing, repurpose. That’s good. Yeah. It’s definitely more repurposing. So the traditional recycling aspect is where you have a good or a product that’s completely used up and it gets transformed into another good. You know, there you take, you take your plastic container, you melted down and turned into another plastic or glass glasses and easy to recycle one, you melt it, you make another bottle and take your beer bottle turns in another beer bottle with carbon you would take your road bike, you know, for whatever reason, if you need to do that and you basically when you’re going to turn into another product, it’s already cured, painted.
Shawn: 15:48 It’s got grease on it. Who knows whatever your body’s. What? The way that recycling typically works is you pulverize it. I liken this to running through a wood chipper. If you ever chipped a tree, and this is not a lot of recycling works, is you may see breaking down into a manageable particle size that can then be picked up by the front end motor, right? So now you have a pulverized bike or object and it basically has to get broken down into its constituent parts. The way you do that is he basically run it through a blast furnace and what that does is that burns off any grease, any paint, any approximate or residents that were used and what your leftover and the reason why you do that is because carbon fiber itself as a dry fabric is incredibly thermally stable up to like 5,000 degrees.
Shawn: 16:39 It’s hotter than will Smith’s Miami something to think about. So it’s incredibly thermally stable. It doesn’t actually have any problem, but the other stuff burns off at a much lower temperature, so that’s the easiest way to do it. Right? The one, the issues with that process, the only dirty part of that process. Then you have all the smoke fumes, whatever from that bernoff process. Right. But what’s interesting about incineration processes, they can be incredibly clean as far as your waist gas and you just have to get you really hot, really hot, really, really hot. Fire kills. All right, think of the sun. That’s an extreme, but it’s also an extreme fire source. So for instance, I mean, but realistically how different is in that element of heat? That’s how you recycle aluminum to this, maybe you inject a thermal load and it’s a little different and we’ll talk about that in a second.
Shawn: 17:28 OK. Um, so that is like the only really dirty part of that process. It can be cleaned, you can run things through different filters, you can catch all that stuff, you know, if it’s done in the us, that stuff’s very tightly controlled. So it’s gonna be a clean process and then you’re left over with basically raw, very short fiber of carbon, which is super useful at that point. It’s known as whisker casting. Basically it’s, you know, it’s whatever size that’s maybe an inch long, slow pulpy, I would call it it’s dry pulp, fiber and then you do whatever you want with it.
Dan: 18:00 Right. So going back to one of the critiques of carbon fiber recycling is that these off gas byproducts are super toxic, right? Well, they can be, they can be, but your title pipe, our environmental standards here are such as that stuff’s not really getting put back into the environment. Carbon Fiber realtor, right? Carbon fiber recycling is a thing. It is being done. And the byproduct realistically is not that bad. It’s very tightly
Shawn: 18:35 Pa, you know, and yet again, as we as people of this country are, weekend can. Well right now it’s a little harder. But we have saying who gets the head of the EPA? I know there’s a lot of shit going on there right now. So that’s another lesson on
Dan: 18:51 I’m going to do another podcast. But as far as you know, an aluminum recycling that process. So it’s interesting, you know also involves intense amount of heat and energy and insane amount of energy. Is that energy more or less than carbon recycling?
Shawn: 19:09 Oh, I have no idea. So I’ve been to a steel recycling plan when we do give, going to engineering school field trips and nothing I love more than visiting. Well, anything really. Manufacturing plants, one of the coolest ones. Then Wisconsin, they were steel recycler. It basically would take all the scrap steels. Aluminum is probably pretty similar. They would separate it. You definitely try to get it out by its constituents. Likely what’s deals, what steel, et cetera get out of its alloy elements because that will change your byproduct or output and their. What they did is they were loaded into what looked like a giant cauldron, like this place would be like a mad scientist dream because we went into the control room, had to put on these basic welding mass until watching the process and there’s basically a 15 foot cauldron. Then they just dump all the scrap into.
Shawn: 19:57 And then what happens is this giant graphite rod descends from the ceiling and this is like 18 inches in diameter by like 10 feet. Well does an arc furnace electric arc furnace. So what happens is, you know, it’s basically, think of it as more akin to welding, right? Welding is basically a tiny, tiny, tiny arc furnace innocence and then all sudden the lights start dimming because they’re heating up that big old grand buildings started shaking and there’s like lightning and you’re like, this is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever witnessed. And then out the bottom comes liquid molten steel and you know, and they turn into white where long story short, about 10 miles of processing later it turns into eight wire. Wow. Yeah. That’s a process to watch. I don’t know truly how they recycle aluminum off the top of my head. I’m imagining it’s something someone or they’re going to have to clean it and wash it. He didn’t melt it. Turn it back into something. Right. With different types of aluminum’s. I don’t know if you can only recycle like 6,000 series together versus [inaudible] versus [inaudible]. I don’t know. I don’t have to read into that because that may be an interesting not discussed topic here. Like a lot of bikes, 7,000 series. Now you know what components are 7,000 series, some are 6,000 series.
Dan: 21:12 Can the older the series b
Shawn: 21:15 right? No, no.
Dan: 21:17 So he had again. So there’s a lot. I mean there’s a lot that goes into the recycling as it is. One of the things also about this is that what we wanted to talk about was, you know before, before carbon fiber and before aluminum become that product, they need to be. They both come from somewhere, right? The precursor of carbon fiber comes from oil. Aluminum obviously needs to be mined, so when you start talking about those things, when you look at a full
Shawn: 21:48 resource, natural resource, one way or another, they’re both ever and everything is. Yeah, everything has a beginning and an end.
Dan: 21:55 So what is ultimately going to be worse mining for aluminum
Shawn: 22:02 versus a drill, right? Yeah. So it’s interesting there.
Dan: 22:06 Obviously we want to bring down the level of both of those.
Shawn: 22:11 Well that’s the interesting thing about a manufactured technology product. It can continue to advance aluminum bed mind. It’ll be mine. Yeah. It comes from bauxite, which is how it stable in the ground. Hard to separate at that point. Very common and aluminum is everywhere. Like when you look at, I forget what it is on the global, like earth mineralogy seven percent of the earth is aluminum. Correct. So it’s everywhere. The whole lot, which is pretty cool, right? Um, but the hardest thing was separating it from those, you know, from its binders or from the other parts of the minerals and getting into of raw for him. Right. And that’s still difficult. It takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of, I don’t know, chemistry, I guess to really separate. I forget how they do it. So that’s a whole process. That’s the way it’s been done. Not have a lot of advancements there. I mean, yeah, I guess it’s an outside perspective. There’s been advancements, but it’s still, you got to dig it, you gotta clean it, you got to separate it
Dan: 23:11 from a true environmental perspective. Going very deep here, you can make the argument that neither one of them are environmental 100 percent, you know, nothing is alive. And that’s our point in this is that to say that it’s so hard to say that one is more environmentally friendly than the other.
Shawn: 23:30 Right. Oh, it’s an apples to Kol perspective. Yeah. It’s just, it’s
Dan: 23:35 almost impossible to make these claims that as true, that one is worse than the thing like
Shawn: 23:41 about carbon specifically is such a new material. There’s a lot of advancements to be made as far as how it’s created and there’s some huge changes coming in the next few years. Oakridge national labs is a huge ones where they cut the energy intensity and carbon production by 50 percent. That’s insane. And the same talks about the resident systems being toxic. They come from a, that’s another petroleum based chemistry, heavy background. Their bio residents now there didn’t used to be by. Our residents really are not as good to be honest. They’re not, they’re getting better and they’re more, you know, and you’re like, OK, well now we need corn. Corn get fertilizer. I don’t know. Right. You can keep trade. Something comes from you don’t get into anything for free. Exactly.
Dan: 24:27 There’s an environmental and energy and a water impact on everything. Alright, so again, our whole point is like, think critically critically about this is that it’s not easy to make anything. Everything comes from somewhere. You know, like for example, I’m looking at the specialized Duke University study that they put out in 2014 that everybody references anyway, I’m looking at the chart here of the rebate frame versus the ela frame. Again, fresh water consumed to make one rebate frame, 2100 liters to make an frame. 1,700 leaders. Now the global warming potential, which is the, the amount of CO2 and this is, I don’t know where they got this rating, but the kilograms of CO2 that goes off in the production of Aruba frame 67, uh, the kilograms of CO2 that comes off and producing in La frame 250. So again, hard to say,
Shawn: 25:32 well here’s the comparison, is carbon use a carbon bike used a lot of water to make, right? What Sandy? Yeah, I’m total wet. Santana was I think, but what aluminum bike needs a lot of electric power to make. And the reason why is they have to artificially aged the aluminum around 10 hours. Heat everything. Yeah. You have to write the current bike. It’s one and done. You can heat it. Cool. It maybe an hour, you know, any molded
Dan: 25:59 when you’re heating. It takes cool because it uses electricity to do so
Shawn: 26:05 or they’re directly using the blast furnace of some sort. Right? Yeah. So exactly. So as far as on air quality goes, aluminum bike is way worse if you look at it from my perspective.
Dan: 26:16 Yeah. And another thing that we were thinking like yes, carbon bikes do require a lot of water, but those could also technically be closed loop systems and we’re not certain that they are, but they definitely could, couldn’t, you know, there’s definitely a way to wet sand and filter gray water system and keep using the amount of water. So yes. Does it take 2100 leaders to make a Reuben reframe? It does, but that doesn’t necessarily
Shawn: 26:44 mean it’s 2100 liters. Every single free bike could use the same 2100 liters. Exactly. So that to us is another kind of like that’s a best case scenario. Best case scenario, I’ll be our own skeptic and say it’s waybright I don’t trust anybody. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, you know. Yet again, if water becomes more scarce and it’s pretty easy to run a filter and hooked that back to the intake, don’t another thing, another thing that they were kind of just touched on this, but we should know a little bit more in depth is a common misconception that keeps coming up here is the toxicity of resins. That one is complicated, which, OK, briefly when you’re making them, that’s probably the worst part of the process. Once everything has been cleared, those residents are. And what he brought up the point that it’s really common in these overseas factories as they make their own residents in house, you know, like we buy ours from Mitsubishi, so they’re making their own [inaudible] in house and the reasons are trade secret I guess, or it’s easier, it’s cheaper.
Shawn: 27:52 Who knows? Right. On a multitude of reasons. Economy of scales, essentially what it comes down to. And yeah, we don’t know what those resident factories look like. They’re their own lab. Um, you basically have to create products that need to be mixed together to combine the final third product. And Yeah, when they’re mixed together, you basically created what’s known as the thermoset plastic and thermal sets. They’re incredibly stable, an inert, you know, they don’t degrade. That’s part of the hard part about them. They’d. That’s actually the why. The reason why they’re difficult to recycle. They are very stable and they’re in or they’re not going to look like overtime. They’re not going to leach. Landfills are not the solution, but they’re the solution that we use as a society and it’s not going to leach. It’s not going to leak. It’s just going to sit there for an incredibly long time before those polymer bonds start to break down.
Shawn: 28:47 I don’t know, I’m going to say it’s a right, but it’s just so the only thing that people ever poke holes in this argument is, which is sort of valid, is that when you may actually make something. You know when you’re making a cake and you’re running your kitchenaid, you’re pouring in the ingredients. You don’t get a perfectly mixed structure no matter you let that thing mix for a long time. Obviously the longer you let it mix but you get stuff stuck to the wall, you know, and then you have to scrape it off with your spatula and epoxies are the same way. I mean you’re probably getting a 99 point nine, nine, nine, nine, nine percent cross-linked mixture, but there is the chance that there is some aspect of that that is not cross linked or tiered tiny. I don’t know how much it may depend on everybody, but I mean we’re talking, I want to say insignificant but nearly insignificant amounts and that’s what gets brought up a lot of. Just like what about uncured agents is the phrase small likelihood. Yeah. And it’s one of those things. Is it worth even talking about? I mean, yes,
Dan: 29:53 but as far in terms of overall effect,
Shawn: 29:56 right? It’s like zooming in on something like with a microscope, you know, it’s like I, for my head, when I’m 3d modeling something, you can zoom in forever and make a part with 100 zeroes in front of that one. Then you zoom out and you’re like, oh, it does. You know, let’s look at the real story. And picture here. Um, yeah, it’s kind of an insignificant talking point. My opinion. Yeah.
Dan: 30:19 Comes up a lot though. I don’t know why people bring it up so much. I mean, I think it’s just a bit of a misconception thing. Yeah. It’s like the one talking point where someone goes, what do you can say? It’s not possible. I can mean the word has a lot of toxic toxicity system of a down home. We, we w, you know, I understand. Um, but I think it’s a big misconception and we wanted to bring up that point as well.
Shawn: 30:48 Yeah, I mean, again, it’s not great to have to throw a bike and the good news is you don’t have to do. So the big thing that I want to talk about, jumping into my high horse here, my horse of 10 feet, the best thing you can ever do if you’re looking at environmental product life cycles are lifespans is to keep it not by a second one, right. You know, hey, is, is to not buy things, you know, buy something good once and keep it and fix it when it needs fixing. Why do we both own own old toyotas? Because they’re super easy to fix and street cred. Well, just getting trail credit, realistic, you know, if you go out and buy a new bike every year. Yeah, you’re impacting things. I mean it is.
Dan: 31:38 You’re being hyperbolic because we love our trucks, but that is the reason why I bought a used car rather than a new car is that energy’s already been put in what’s already been created for. Right? Why? Why buy something new when something that’s already been created that I can fix a lot of things on myself. Well, it’s like going to it
Shawn: 31:57 goodwill to buy a shirt versus buying a new shirt. Right? Which, you know, there’s times and places to buy new, but there’s, you know, if you really are concerned about environmental impact of things, these, these options don’t always buy you the creative. That object was already won and done already in the air. It’s already been.
Dan: 32:15 Which going back to what Leo and this whole pole stories saying, here’s one of the things that I agree with him on his. His point is like, look, it’s more about consumerism and the problem of consumerism portal and I get, and I agree with that 100 percent we’re seeing, I mean, you know, in the outdoor industry across the past decade is every, you know, the product has come down and down and down and down and down, and it’s about getting something new, buying something new because it has new technology, even if it’s only half of a percent better than previous, so that, you know, a huge point of his, his huge point of contention of him is, you know, the consumerist mentality in the west and is it a little bit idealized? Of course. But I agree with him on that. That is also a huge part of the problem is our created desire and need to get new things.
Shawn: 33:12 That’s a whole different story. The thing that I think about a lot, we’re talking about product lifecycle or lifespan, you know, like, you know, let’s say bought a bike 10 years ago, material independent, a lot’s changed now. That’s the harder part is parts change and you can’t find parts anymore for [inaudible] quick-release mountain bikes. Right? I know they’re still out there, but wait, 10 years from now there won’t be. That’s a different story. That said something that you know, we’re really were the drivers of that demand change, but what I look at, the reason why I love the business of our business here is we fixed things and one thing that doesn’t get talked about a lot, most of you will think you break your bike. It’s one and done. That’s true. If it’s an aluminum bike, I know technically you can repair and aluminum bike now it’s not cost productive to do it and good luck finding somebody and there’s probably.
Shawn: 34:03 There’s people that can do it, but you have to yet again re weld it and then he treated again doable. It’s not the most complicated thing, but is that bike worth? That’s up to you. But. So aluminum has a fatigue life. It’s not a lifetime product. You can get a lot of life out of it for sure, but it’s not a lifetime profit. Right. And when do you have to do a repair? It’s much more energy and labor intensive to do a repair. You know, knowing people that repair metal bikes, it’s a thousand bucks because you ever replace a whole tube, rejig it, rewelded, grind it, mitre it, whatever pain. It is. Very labor-intensive. The one of the cool things about carbon is when you do a repair as localized, if it breaks, we’re not replacing the chainstay we’re playing, we’re replacing the carbon around the damaged area. It’s pretty small.
Dan: 34:57 And the amount of carbon, like, you know, for the average top tube seats they’ve repair that we do is kind of amazing. The amount of carbon that we put on in the sentence is, it’s really not a lot. No, it’s hardly any at all. When I walked back there and I see Joel cutting up pre preg pieces to put on and like that’s it. That’s it. And obviously it’s. Our repairs are designed to be stronger than the bike originally, so it’s more carbon than necessary and it’s still a crazy small amount easing.
Shawn: 35:31 So it’s also cheaper. I’m going to say our average repair, it’s about 500 bucks. That includes pain, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper, and you can keep repairing carbon. Does it fatigue either in generally it’s considered as an infinite fatigue life, so barring driving it in your garage, crashing it, et Cetera, your current bike should last you most of your life.
Dan: 35:53 Yeah, I mean all things being equal, right? All things being considered equal. Not to say that they are from the, from the actual mining of bauxite to getting oil out to producing carbon fiber or aluminum, right? That whole life cycle analysis of either product, all things essentially being considered equal. The lifecycle of carbon is way, way, way longer. It is like immensely longer presented for the. Exactly. What we’re talking about now is it can be repaired on accordingly
Shawn: 36:26 and this, you know, global warming value study or the, you know what, what does the final value? They rank them on the creation of the away frame versus the survey. Ruby Bay frame merely were equal in environmental impact, not perfectly. You know, they look at materials, packaging, manufacturing, transportation, product care. End of life, and they assigned points through bay frame. 60 nine. Law is 69 point seven, so they’re nearly equal on environmental impact. Not going to be a snob. Renee frame is two times the price of the way. It’s a much nicer bike, so I mean if you’re, you’re getting into
Dan: 37:11 nicer bike for the same environment. Olympia, the same environmental impact with a longer life cycle to the repairability of the product. Right? I mean it’s only points and in difference aluminum, it’s still technically worse on environmental impact based on this study. Again, it’s less than one whole point. It’s still technically worse, so they’re equal enough. I mean again, right. We’re saying all things are being considered equal.
Shawn: 37:44 There are within variants. There’s another study that excel North America did and if you’re familiar with excel, they’re the big parent company that owns Raleigh and diamond back and I forget who else is under their umbrella, but that does up the highway here in Washington and they. They did a study and they’re carbon bikes or significantly less energy intensive than their aluminum bikes. Great. Significantly. I don’t. I’ve been in, haven’t been able to find the study, it’s only been referenced, but that was their comment on it and the cool thing is, is yet again, looking down the road, let’s future cast, be forward thinkers. Just like Leo who’s describing himself as a forward thinker, carbons only going to get better if all things are equal now and it’s already creating a much better product by some of these changes in the manufacturing process. Clean up and get better and better and better is going to drastically outperform aluminum on every level.
Shawn: 38:43 Totally. I mean, we’re already seeing that. I know granted aluminum frames are getting better performance wise. Yeah, they’re more hypotheic the actual material itself is not being advanced change. No. And there’s no like different alloys being created and again, carbon as a product, as a material is going to keep getting better. Oh yeah. We’re still in the infancy. I would say early teenage years were tweens. Um, but yeah, again, like our production is getting greener and greener and greener, less energy intensive, which is awesome and it’s going to drop that energy value and half a recycling is coming up more and more and more so forward thinking carbon’s going to have less of an impact on the environment than metallic structures and it’s the lighter and stronger. So it’s like, it’s kind of like, obviously I would love composites. They’re not perfect, but it’s definitely where the future’s going.
Shawn: 39:43 Yeah, it’s definitely not perfect. So in conclusion, where do we go from here? What are the takeaways? Really pretty much the biggest takeaway is you a should think critically about the articles and studies that come out and are presented to you. Again, as we said at the beginning of this, everything is tinted with marketing that’s been admitted. So there’s already that. The second thing that you can do is take care of what you have. Keep what you have for as long as possible that you, if it’s a carbon fiber bike, if it’s an aluminum bike, right? That is going to be the most environmental thing you can do is repair over purchase. The beauty of carbon is that it’s much more repairable. A aluminum is obviously we went on to why it’s so difficult. So I guess my takeaway from this is always think critically about what you own, what you buy, and also what you read.
Shawn: 40:39 Um, you know, there’s documented information out there in this hundred and 79 page report from Duke and specialized that’s heavily researched topic, are there versus reading into a very limited view from a single person representing a company representing a brand. One of the most environmental things that you can do is keep what you have right now. Keep preparing, keep maintaining, you know, that’s probably the biggest. Yeah, that is the best thing you can do if you’re a true environmental illness, is don’t buy, repair. My favorite is, I mean from the northwest Patagonia, but they put out a lot of inflammation repair that emotionally beats true for a lot of us. If they say it’s a radical act to not buy, you know, that’s their own branding on it, which is clever and well done. But uh, you know, in some senses it’s true. You don’t want to not buy something new is incredibly radical.
Dan: 41:36 Four year old la doesn’t mean that that’s a bad bike.
Shawn: 41:40 No, no, not at all. You know, there’s a time and a place to buy something new because you actively want to. And that’s fine. That’s everybody’s individual choice. But, you know. Yeah.
Dan: 41:51 And again, we’re not out here saying that this study is wrong. We just felt like there were some. We, we felt the carbon side was underrepresented, right? Which is why, I mean obviously you all know we repair carbon fiber, so that’s the side that we’re going to take. Um, but again, we’re not calling the study wrong. We’re definitely not calling out pole because we respect their choice, right? They’re making their claims from an environmentally ethical place. There’s no critiquing that because we respect it. But again, think critically about studies, articles, publications, keep what you have.
Shawn: 42:31 If you have a carbon bike, we’re always here to repair for you.
Dan: 42:35 We realize that this is a pretty heavy topic for a podcast. Uh, we also don’t want to bore everybody, so I’m sure there are things that we’ve missed. If you have any comments, questions or concerns, please leave them in the comments. We would love to continue this conversation as we think it is very important for the dynamic of the bike industry at the moment.
Shawn: 42:58 Yeah. Honestly, it’s a conversation that can be had every six months. Right. You know, just like we like to say it’s good to check into it once in awhile. Yeah, the presence that is.
Dan: 43:07 But yeah, like I said, if you have any thoughts, comments, concerns, things that we missed. If you want to call us out on something, feel free. That’s what the common sections for, but as always we really love putting together these podcasts going forward. The fiber side chats are going to be more of a once every other week kind of identity. We’re trying to take the long form approach to more of these. Definitely. Definitely going to still be doing interviews as well, so check out a look for fireside chats, you know, one or two times a month. Uh, going forward from here, we’re going to be putting out a lot more carbon queries as well. If you haven’t checked those out yet, those are our short, a twice a week episodes answering your carbon fiber related questions.
Shawn: 43:54 Actually, other than that, signing off. Yeah, I’ll catch you all next time.