Biking may be good for you, but producing aluminum and steel for bike frames isn't so good to the Earth. Not to mention, metal frames are ever-so-20th century.Enter the bamboo bicycle. Though the first was exhibited in London in 1894, the design has only lately become a small sensation, not only among bike hipsters but Ghanaian entrepreneurs, who like bamboo for its availability, biodegradability and highly renewable qualities (a bamboo stalk can grow up to three feet a day).A new project, Alabamboo, seeks to bring that appreciation to a wider audience across the US. In Greensboro, Alabama, five designers will use a new workshop set up by the guys behind Brooklyn's Bamboo Bike Studio to build a new set of bamboo bikes, before taking off on some of those cycles for a cross country trip to San Francisco. Along the way, the riders will stop at universities and organizations to host workshops and discuss the virtues of designing with bamboo, among other things.According to the project's call for donations, the initiative was branded "Alabamboo" as the first step to making Alabama mean bamboo the way Florida means oranges, Idaho means potatoes and Maine means lobsters – and to create the most accessible, renewable sustainable bicycle on the market.Adding intrigue to the project are its founders. John Bielenberg is a graphic designer with over 250 design awards under his belt and a partner at the radical creative agency C2. He runs the intensive creative program, Project M which is meant to inspire young designers, writers, engineers, etc to "think wrong" in order to generate new ideas and design directions to challenge the status-quo.COMMON is run by Alex Bogusky, founding partner of ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which made those controversial Groupon Super Bowl ads and the creepy Burger King promos. Since swearing off the ad industry altogether, Bogusky has been operating Fearless Revolution and Fearless Cottage, where he explores new relationships between people and brands to promote a positive future.Starting with the Alabamboo project, their new company, COMMON, hopes to bring together thinkers and makers to rapidly prototype solutions for social problems.
Pitched as "a new capitalist brand" built on "transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage, Common starts with the premise, writes Maria Popova at Design Observer, that "the capitalist paradigm has the capacity to solve global poverty and the concern that the planet's environmental limits are being pushed to unreasonable extremes."Donate to the project here.
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The United States is the largest importer of bamboo in the world, with no domestic, commercially available supply of its own. Our goal is that Alabamboo will one day represent the largest domestically available resource. Bamboo is a valuable and sustainable alternative for many products including textiles, wood floors, furniture, and paper products. It is also one the most efficient carbon-sequestering plants in the world. There are many misconceptions about bamboo and the truths make it more of a miracle plant than a nuisance. There is already a growing movement taking place in Alabama and we want to be a part of sharing the story.
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Pitched as "a new capitalist brand" built on "transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage, Common starts with the premise, writes Maria Popova at Design Observer, that "the capitalist paradigm has the capacity to solve global poverty and the concern that the planet's environmental limits are being pushed to unreasonable extremes."Donate to the project here.