Reduce,re-use,re-ride: Bike waste and moving towards a circular economy for sporting goods

Abstract

What happens to our sporting goods when we are done with them? Even though Sustainable Development Goal 12 focuses on responsible consumption and production, very few in the sports industry (and academy) have asked this question. With environmental degradation now a daily concern around the world, we can no longer produce and consume sporting goods without considering the end-of-use stage for these products. This study focuses on the bike and its role in global waste accumulation through various forms of planned obsolescence. Through interviews with experts in and around the bike industry and waste management, we provide insight into the environmental barriers that are structural and specific to the bike industry. We then advocate for extended producer responsibility and the circular economy as an imperfect but radical alternative future.

Climate degradation is a global concern and becomes increasingly pertinent with each passing day. The United Nations (UN) has called upon the sports industry multiple times to act as stewards of the planet (SDG, 2016; United Nations, 2010). Athletes (e.g. Baker, 2014; Jarvis, 2013), associations (e.g. NHL, 2014; Orr and Inoue, 2019; Scott and McBoyle, 2007), events (e.g. Death, 2011; Millington et al., 2018), and facilities (e.g. Mallen and Chard, 2012; Millington and Wilson, 2016) have all been identified as critical players in achieving the environmental sustainability of sports. ¹ Despite existing efforts to “green” the industry, questions are seldom asked or addressed by those organizing or promoting sport about how overall production and consumption habits might be altered to counteract environmental degradation.

This situation is in some ways unsurprising. Although the UN in 2015 announced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG Goal 12—which advocates for “changing the way we produce and consume goods and resources,” “doing more and better with less,” and “reducing resource use, degradation and pollution along the whole life cycle” (United Nations, n.d.)—when the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP, n.d.) released its contributions to achieving the SDGs, sporting goods manufacturers and brands were not called upon to change how their products are produced and consumed. Under Goal 12 in the UNOSDP's proclamation, neither the words “production” nor “consumption” are used once. At best, an argument is made in favor of creating sustainability standards for producing sports products, but that is the extent of direction provided.

If sport is as integral to environmental sustainability as the UNOSDP proposes then it is crucial that sporting goods manufacturers and brands be held accountable for this global objective. Equally, is it essential that attention be paid to who has input into industry standards; the logic behind the development of criteria for these standards; strategies for holding the industry accountable; and ways to prioritize environmental progress over economic gain. Ultimately, we need to question how the material aspects of sports participation and consumption contribute to environmental degradation and consider potential and preferred futures for sport and consumption.

This paper, and the research reported herein, is an attempt to play a part in taking up this challenge. We do this by focusing on the above noted question about how sport-related forms of production and consumption contribute to environmental degradation, while also considering strategies for pro-environment change in this realm—with a particular focus on the bicycle and bicycle industry as one notable part of a broader sport industry. We suggest that the bicycle is a notable case for several reasons. For one, the bicycle is associated with a range of social issues and environment-related topics—and has long offered academics a platform of inquiry, from its connection to women's liberation (e.g. Hall, 2018; Macrae, 2015; Strange, 2002) to its implementation as a tool for social and economic development (e.g. Jones and Novo de Azevedo, 2013; Nwabughuogu, 1984; McSweeney et al., 2021). Cycling is also celebrated as one of the most sustainable activities and modes of transportation available (Aldred, 2012). Advocates assert, “Cycling causes virtually no environmental damage, promotes health through physical activity, takes up little space and is economical, both in direct user costs and public infrastructure costs. In short, cycling is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable” (Pucher and Buehler, 2017: 689), albeit not necessarily in a just manner across lines of race, gender, and/or class (Hoffman, 2016; Lugo, 2018; Steinmann and Wilson, 2022).

At the same time, every product, including a bicycle, has an end-of-life stage; hence, it is important that we separate the environmentally friendly activity of cycling from the product itself, which leaves a significant (and uncalculated) carbon footprint. For example, Parkin's (2012) edited collection, Cycling and Sustainability, offers 12 chapters on cycling's relationship with the environment but nowhere is the bicycle's relationship to the environment questioned. Moreover, scholars such as Stoddart (2011) point to the contradictions that sometimes exist between the viewpoints of environmentally conscious athletes and the actual sporting practices of these athletes.

This article begins with a sociological critique of waste and then outlines what we know about the environmental impact of sporting goods/bike production and consumption. It then draws on semi-structured interview data gathered during the production of a short documentary on this topic called, “Revolutions.” The experts interviewed were able to provide insight into the inner workings of the bike industry and some of the structural barriers that lead to more waste than necessary. The article concludes by offering possible ways forward by shifting away from traditional linear economic practices, also known as “cradle to grave” processes, towards a more circular “cradle to cradle” economy (McDonough and Braungart, 2002) through extended producer responsibility.

What is waste?

We can waste effort, energy, labor, things, and/or time; therefore, waste is a broad term that we apply to many different scenarios and objects. The sociological critique of waste is most often drawn back to Mary Douglas’ 1966 book Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. In Douglas’ analysis, she uses the concept of hygiene/purity to understand various religious traditions; and to do this, dirt is framed as equivalent to social disorder. Since then, sociologists have generally understood waste beyond something unwanted—seeing it instead as something that is contextual. In communities where resources do not exist in excess, things are generally not thrown away because they are too valuable (Hasbrouck, 2011: 10); conversely, where there is excess, disposal does not seem as egregious, rather it becomes a necessity. Importantly though, “waste represents the ‘ongoingness’ of the economic life of commodities after use, not the end of a lineal value chain” (Tong et al., 2015: 31). Sociologically speaking, waste is a fluid concept that reveals more about human activity and priorities than it does about the things marked as waste. As Hawkins (2006) explains, waste is not a static thing, rather what we mark as waste discloses the “logic or illogic of a culture” (p. 2). Environmental sociologist, Myra Hird (2012) purports, “we know ourselves through waste” (p. 456). Thus, if the sporting goods industry has never calculated (or reported) its end-of-life footprint, how much do we actually know about the impact of sports on the environment?

According to The World Bank (2022), the world creates “2.01 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste annually”; however, this pales in comparison to industrial waste which makes up 97% of all solid waste (Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022). High-income countries represent 16% of the world's population, yet they disproportionately “generate about 34 percent, or 683 million tonnes, of the world's waste” (The World Bank, 2022). The moment we put garbage in a designated receptacle it is seemingly no longer a problem; however, “forgotten and out of sight, waste does not really go away” (Hird, 2012: 456). As a result, even though researchers who do work with product lifecycle analyses refer to disposal as the end-of-life stage, we will herein refer to disposal as the end-of-use stage because most of these products live indefinitely.

Settler (and western) interpretations of waste differ drastically from Indigenous interpretations of waste (Hird, 2017). For example, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, prior to colonization, material waste was not an issue for the Inuit. Today, the Inuit face significant waste accumulation because of settler development, over-ordering of construction materials (due to the geographical isolation), and the lack of soil and vegetation in the frozen North (Hird, 2017). The “developed” method of waste management does not translate for those who live with nature, as opposed to in nature. Indigenous communities tend to associate waste with remembering rather than forgetting (read: disposal). For the Aborigines in Australia, settler attempts to manage and hide waste equates to a form of self-erasure. Rose (2003) explains:

The remains of people's action in country tell an implicit story of knowledgeable action: these people knew where they were, they knew how to get the food that is there in the country. The country responded to their presence by providing for them, and the remains are evidence of the reciprocity between country and people … Antisocial people who do not announce themselves, and use special techniques to avoid leaving tracks or traces, are up to no good. (p. 62)

Rose (2003) further contends “people who intend harm and who have something to hide” (p. 62) attempt to erase their presence through (waste) management. Knechtel (2007) makes similar arguments about zero-waste initiatives because erasing our waste “would be to destroy our own reflection” (as cited in Reno, 2014: 8). When we bin, drive, and ship our waste to remote (or low-income/racialized) areas as a form of waste management, we are attempting to erase and contain our activities instead of reconciling our activities with the needs of the earth; we manage the waste instead of ourselves. By framing waste as a problem of technology and science, instead of as a socio-ethical discussion, the focus remains on downstream mitigation techniques such as recycling, landfills, and incineration (Hird, 2013; Tong et al., 2015). Sport sociologists, then, need to ask: Is it possible to foster a reciprocal relationship with the environment where sport and physical activity announce themselves but do not participate in self-erasure through waste management? Is it possible to demonstrate remembrance through the sporting goods supply chain? Or as Liboiron and Lepawsky (2022) argue, there is nothing inherently positive or negative about waste, but it should be read as a relation of power; therefore, can we change the systems in place to enable “wasting well”?

Sporting goods and their environmental impact

In 2016, the global sports market (inclusive of events, teams, sporting goods, and infrastructure), was estimated to be worth $600–700 billion annually and was outpacing the GDP growth of most countries (KPMG, 2016). The sporting goods market is comprised of apparel, footwear, and sports equipment. As of 2016, the global sports equipment market had an estimated valuation of $66.3 billion (Grandview Research, 2018) and is expected to reach $89.22 billion by 2025 (PRNewswire, 2018). Ten years ago, Subic et al. (2009) expressed that the disposal of sporting goods was becoming one of the most critical issues for the sporting goods industry; yet there have been very few attempts to measure the end-of-use carbon footprint of sports equipment (Johnson et al., 2014).

To illustrate, in 2010, the New York Times investigated the environmental impact of abandoned golf balls estimating that 300 million balls litter our planet (Pennington, 2010). Weber et al. (2019) collected almost 40,000 golf balls over two years from the central Californian coast. The team estimated that approximately 28 kg of micro- and nanoplastics had been released into the marine environment from eroding golf balls. They observed wildlife such as seals living around, and sometimes interacting with, the golf balls. These golf balls, while not disposed of in the traditional sense, are contained by the receptacle that is the ocean. Because the ocean obscures the environmental reflection of the golf balls, they have barely registered as an environmental problem.

Johnson et al. (2014) found in their life cycle analysis of Specialized bicycles that manufacturing aluminum frames is extremely energy intensive and making carbon fiber frames uses vast amounts of water. Furthermore, Outside magazine exposed one bicycle factory in China for dumping its carbon fiber production scraps into the ocean because of a lack of appropriate recycling options (Max, 2017). At the other end of the life cycle, bike-sharing companies have been scrutinized for the bike waste they create when their businesses close. When Ofo, a China-based bike-sharing company, closed its Dallas operations in the summer of 2018, it left thousands of bicycles in a pile at a recycling center to become scrap metal (Chappell, 2018). Bike-sharing programs are often touted as the answer to congested, car-centric cities but when companies such as CityCycle in Brisbane, Seattle's Pronto!, and Bixi Montreal go bankrupt all of their bicycles end up in the waste stream (see Lindsey, 2016; McCosker, 2017; Small, 2017). In 1894, an estimated 250,000 bikes were produced in the United States (Pridmore and Hurd, 2001); today, an estimated 18 million new bikes are purchased each year in the United States alone (National Bicycle Dealers Association, 2015). The bicycle is intimately intertwined with broader issues of consumption, class, identity, and waste management; still, despite its importance as a cultural text, it has largely managed to elide environmental critique.

Traditional economies adopt a linear process of “take, make, waste” (Lacy and Rutqvist, 2015: 4), where waste is a presumed and acceptable part of the lifecycle. However, industries are starting to move towards more circular economies where waste created along the supply chain becomes “food” for another process (World Economic Forum, 2017). The circular economy also referred to as a “cradle-to-cradle” approach (McDonough and Braungart, 2002), conceptualizes waste as a design flaw (Thomas, 2013). The circular economy aims for material longevity by designing products that are “long lasting, easy to repair and recycle” (Hazell, 2017: 4). Admittedly, the idea of the circular economy can also be co-opted to encourage more frivolous consumption but, in its most genuine conception, designing with the end in mind is the central tenant (Weiser, 2016). If 80% of a sporting good's environmental footprint is determined during the design phase (Subic et al., 2009), then the end-of-use stage must be prioritized during the design process to ensure circularity, rather than leaving it as an afterthought.

Importantly, we must acknowledge that the circular economy is not a new idea, rather it represents the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge by the business community. Indigenous communities have long participated in circularity/reciprocity (e.g. Liboiron, 2021; Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022). Waste has become a modern problem because it is a byproduct of a binary rooted in Western civilization and the Enlightenment—that humans and nature are two distinct entities rather than interconnected beings (Bell, 2019). Siragusa and Arzyutov (2020) point out that the circular economy only seems “cutting-edge” when it comes from “developed countries” because the ideas of reducing consumption and re-use in the Global South from Indigenous communities are usually marked as backward. Moreover, there are different interpretations of the circular economy. The mainstream interpretation of the circular economy prioritizes efficiency and technocratic solutions, whereas radical interpretations demand drastic changes to current economic systems and call for capping resource extraction (Rask, 2022). Thus, while the circular economy offers a potential way forward, it is equally a look backward and a tool that can be (and has been) appropriated by capitalism if not embraced in a (w)holistic manner.

Methods

Nine semi-structured qualitative interviews took place between June 2019 and June 2021. Five interviews were conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic and video recorded in person by the first author and a research assistant. During the pandemic, pre-interviews took place over Zoom and were recorded for transcription purposes. Follow-up interviews were arranged with four participants and local film crews for the short documentary, and the first author conducted the interviews over Zoom along with the film's director. Interviews ranged from 30 to 90 min.

Interview participants were selected because of their expertise in different areas along the supply chain. Below we offer a short description of each of those interviewed for the study and highlight their positioning in or around the bicycle industry and/or in relation to their expertise in the circular economy and waste:

Erik Bronsvoort, founder of Circular Cycling, a Dutch commercial start-up that seeks to specifically transform the cycling industry. Circular Cycling provides workshops and consulting to the cycling industry about how to incorporate the circular economy into their practices.

Rob Gitelis, founder of Factor Bike Company, located in Taiwan. Factor is one of the few bike companies that completely oversees the design, development, and manufacturing process with its own factories. Factor makes bikes for road, gravel, and mountain biking.

Hernan Montenegro, founder of Montenegro Manufacturing, a California-based bike repair shop. Montenegro runs one of the few carbon fiber repair shops in the United States.

Heather Rubin, VP of Research & Development for Mallinda, a Colorado-based company that specializes in material design. Rubin was able to speak to the importance of the chemistry involved in materials engineering to make a circular economy possible.

Cavan Hua, Volunteer Coordinator and Floor Lead for Our Community Bikes, in Vancouver, Canada; John Buck, founder of Project ReCycle, in Colorado; and Dax Burgos, Shop Director at Community Cycles in Colorado; all represent bicycle repair and recycling shops in two pro-cycling cities. All of these outlets offer Do-It-Yourself bike repair and maintenance classes and spaces, as well as technician repair services. They work to divert bikes from the waste stream by promoting repair and re-use.

Myra Hird, environmental sociologist, Queen's University; and Carl Zimring environmental historian, Pratt Institute; provided the macro academic context needed to understand the larger systems around waste management and recycling. However, while they are included in the documentary, we chose to prioritize non-academic interviews in this paper.

Together these experts were able to map out the constraints of the bike industry and how it fits into broader sociological, economic, and cultural contexts.

We consider these interviews to be a combination of what Bogner and Menz (2009) refer to as “exploratory expert interviews” and “systematizing expert interviews.” The interviews are exploratory to the extent that they serve to “establish an initial orientation in a field [i.e. a field concerned in this case with waste and bicycles] that is either substantively new or poorly defined” (Bogner and Menz, 2009: 46)—and “systematizing” to the extent that they helped us access knowledge “which has been derived from [the interviewee's] practice, is reflexively accessible, and can be spontaneously communicated” (Bogner and Menz, 2009: 47). The knowledge gained through these interviews was, therefore, on the one hand, “technical” (a feature especially of systematizing interviews), in that we gleaned highly specific knowledge from these interviewees concerning with “technical applications, information, or data” pertinent to the bicycle industry, and/or waste production (Döringer, 2021: 266). The knowledge is also “processual” (a feature especially of exploratory interviews), as we learned from interviewees about the “interactions, routines, or social practices” in a field “based on practical experience and the institutional context of [interviewees’] actions”—all the while recognizing that this information was attainable and emerged “due to the position of the person [i.e., the interviewee] in a process” (Döringer, 2021: 266; see also Van Audenhove and Donders, 2019).

Drawing on information gleaned from these interviews—along with the supplemental contextual information noted above, pertinent to bicycles, waste, globalization, governance, the circular economy, power relations, and related topics (and with attention to how to interview findings could be seen to articulate with this contextual information)—we carried out what might be considered an interview-driven contextual cultural studies-oriented analysis (King, 2005).

Our approach to this research—as an exploratory study and contextual cultural studies-oriented analysis that relies on our ability to demonstrate articulations among different pieces of information (including interview-based findings)—will always be “limited” in the sense that contextual analyses are always in some respects selective and partial, as they are reliant on the analysts’ decisions about what connections are considered most pertinent. It is for this reason that future research in this area—that is designed to build on some of what is offered here, and that takes us in new directions we have not thought of—is a crucial next step (we return to this in the conclusion to this paper).

Relatedly, the number of interviewees chosen (n = 9) was less important to us than ensuring that we were able to make meaningful and significant claims based on how the interview data cohered with other forms of context information, and that we were able to—through an assessment of the range of articulated materials—highlight key topics worthy of attention for their social and environmental importance in their own right. As this is an emerging area of study, we also see the data collected and claims we put forth based on this as being foundational for further research in an area of study where limited work has been done to date (thus aligning with the exploratory aims of the research noted earlier). As above, too, by accessing experts working across the bicycle supply chain and those who study waste and the circular economy, we felt that the sample (and sample size) was appropriate for the purposes of the research and in alignment with our study aims.

In this way, we considered the “quality” of this study using a relativist approach, with particular attention to criteria associated with the worthiness of the topic, the significance of the contribution, and with a particular concern with “rich rigor”—which meant, in this case, the recruitment of a sample “appropriate for the purpose of the study and [for] generating data that could provide for meaningful and significant claims” (Smith et al., 2015: 306). We do not suggest that “saturation” was reached, nor was it the aim for a study intended to feature compelling articulations of a range of pieces of information, including interview-based findings (see O’Reilly and Parker, 2013)—as we think that further research would, iteratively, lead to addition compelling insights and developments on the topic.

We would also suggest in this vein that because interviewee recruitment decisions were also based on an interest in creating a compelling story for the documentary film that this paper is built around, quality criteria associated with “resonance” (i.e. developing a story that includes aesthetic and evocative representations—Burke, 2016; Tracy, 2010) were relevant here too, although to a lesser degree than in the film (as our aim for this paper was more around contextualizing and conveying themes). Of course, doing interviews in the context of the development of a documentary film—which required additional decisions and resources with respect to finding appropriate filming locations and with attention to how interviewees could be presented (in the film) alongside other interviewees and images (with background music and other sounds too) to ensure a powerful narrative—posed some technical and organizational difficulties that would not be issued for more conventional audio-recorded interviews. Although it is unclear in hindsight how this study might have been different if it was not carried out as part of a documentary project, for the purposes of this paper we feel that the key markers of quality noted above were met regardless—although we could see how doing interviews in the context of a documentary might impact interviewee recruitment (some might be more or less willing to be involved in a project where they might be on film) and influence what respondents might feel comfortable saying.

For the purposes of analyzing the interviews themselves, transcripts were deductively coded for themes around planned obsolescence, with ongoing reference to questions about the particularities of the bicycle industry, broader themes around production, consumption, power relations, environmental governance, and potential and preferred futures for bikes from a socio-environmental perspective, with a focus on the circular economy. The following analysis starts by explaining waste generation from bicycle production broadly and then focuses on practices of planned obsolescence that are specific to the bike industry—as part of our exploratory and contextualized consideration of the bicycle industry.

Supply chain waste

The cycling industry today is made up of a plethora of bikes for various needs. A quick Google search turns up mountain bikes, cruisers, road bikes, folding bikes, hybrids, touring bikes, cyclo-cross bikes, BMX bikes, fatbikes, gravel bikes, cargo bikes, and enduro bikes among the many possibilities. This variety speaks to different usage and needs, which means different users and manufacturers also produce different kinds of waste. It also makes it that much more difficult to oversee circular solutions when there is this kind of variety and specificity within the bike market.

Aerial photos of “bike graveyards” in China illustrate that you can have too much of a good thing. Bike sharing, in theory, should reduce the number of bikes required; however, when bike sharing is seen as a business opportunity we end up with mountains of excess bikes. As Rob Gitelis, founder of Factor bicycles told us, “Share bike is a great idea … 10 billion of them is not a good idea” (personal communication, March 31, 2021). In this section, we discuss the number of bikes that exist in “excess,” the waste created from the research and development process, and how e-bikes further complicate bike waste.

Most bike recycling outlets do not keep track of the bicycles they receive but Project ReCycle (Colorado) estimated they receive 100 bikes per week in the summer and 50 per week in the winter. John Buck, CEO of Project ReCycle (now called Hope Cycle) stated, “We really don’t have an issue with getting bikes though, we have so many! It's actually sometimes too much” (personal communication, June 11, 2019). At one time, Project ReCycle had a partnership with a big box store to take their returned bikes because these stores are not set up with repair facilities/staff. Before this arrangement, returned bikes, even if in perfect working condition, would have been landfilled. Community Cycles (Colorado) receives approximately 15 – 30 bikes per day but sometimes they receive large fleet donations. When Ofo closed its bike-sharing business, Community Cycles received almost 200 of Ofo's fleet. Other times they have received 500 bikes in a week. These are two examples of local organizations working to divert thousands of bicycles from landfills each year.

Still, we need to keep in mind that donated bikes are not “recycled” in a 1:1 fashion. Cavan Hua from Our Community Bikes in Vancouver, Canada explained:

Some of the bikes that get donated to us, realistically are beyond repair. People mean well but a lot of the times the bikes, especially this past year with the pandemic, only about 10-15% are actually usable for the shop … Pre-pandemic the numbers were much healthier, like around 30-40% of bikes that are donated to us were able to be refurbished for either sale or to be given to the Pedals for the People program. (personal communication, February 15, 2021)

The fact that a salvage rate of 30%–40% is considered a “healthy” number tells us a lot about the limits of recycling and re-use. This amount of excess is made possible because of a “capitalist cosmology” where commodities are seen as disconnected from nature (Schmidt, 2021). Mononaturalism, on the other hand, views human actions as part of a larger unifying relational construct, and thus waste does not exist in excess (Schmidt, 2021). Bike recycling outlets are made possible by the surplus in bike manufacturing and the lack of sustainable disposal options.

There are also considerable amounts of waste created during the research and development phases. According to Gitelis, factories scrap approximately 7% of their material from production and those scraps can usually be downcycled; however, there are also reject rates of approximately 5% for products that are made but have defects or do not meet safety requirements. In the quest to make safe and durable bikes factories must break frames in the testing process and those rejects are landfilled. Bikes that are designed to be durable unfortunately do not biodegrade. When we spoke to wood frame manufacturers off the record, it was explained that to convince consumers that wood bikes are worth the investment manufacturers lacquer and seal the wood to the point that it will not biodegrade.

Electric bikes (e-bikes) also came up during our discussions because they rely on motors: “if your motor fails all of a sudden, the rest of your bike fails as well because you cannot find a replacement motor. And, since motors are such an expensive part of the bike … you will get rid of the rest of your bike” (Erik, personal communication, June 1, 2021). Erik Bronsvoort, the founder of Circular Cycling, additionally pointed to the environmental harm caused by sourcing materials such as lithium and the metals needed to make the magnets for the motors. Gitelis stated, “we’re going to have tens of thousands of batteries and motors, which are cheap because they are not expensive e-bikes. These are e-bikes that are going to break and there will be no solution for how to dispose of them” (personal communication, March 31, 2021).

The issues discussed thus far are not unique to the bike industry because capitalist modes of production necessitate waste through planned obsolescence. However, there are two aspects specific to the bike manufacturing industry that expedites waste generation: the lack of universal standards to ensure component compatibility, and the crash replacement warranty.

Planned obsolescence

The worst thing we can do is ride this bike forever and not buy a new one.

∼ Hernan Montenegro, Montenegro Manufacturing

Planned obsolescence can be delineated in three ways: technical obsolescence, stylistic/psychological obsolescence, and “superfluous within the necessary” (Maycroft, 2009: 28). Technical obsolescence generally refers to electronics where components can be designed to expire pre-maturely with the goal of encouraging faster consumption rates. Stylistic or psychological obsolescence is wholly informed by marketing and the creation of social norms that dictate the pace of consumption. The third form of obsolescence refers to the “nesting” of products within a network of peripheral products that are required to operate and sustain the original purchase (e.g. adapters, cases, and software updates) (Maycroft, 2009: 29). These peripherals contribute to over- and unnecessary consumption. Planned obsolescence thrives on collective forgetting to clear the path for new products.

To the best of our knowledge, sporting goods have not yet entered broader discussions about planned obsolescence even though the industry heavily engages in stylistic obsolescence. This form of obsolescence is more rampant in industries where market saturation is quickly achieved (Guiltinan, 2009), such as in regional sports markets. The deluge of alternative jersey options is one example of stylistic obsolescence in sports (Heath, 1999). While consumers make purchase decisions based on a large mixture of considerations such as price, availability, functionality, and/or aesthetics, we must also acknowledge the power of advertising to make consumers feel “uncomfortable in one's own skin. The constant availability of alternative styles to ‘adapt to’, to purchase, thrives on this discomfort” (Ewen, 1999: 91). This discomfort is what drives a collective forgetting and waste accumulation.

With sports equipment, the “discomfort” often stems from not having the most up-to-date competitive advantage or the safest product available. Changes to new lines of equipment are always a combination of style and technologies; however, the technological changes are often negligible in performance but have grave consequences for the environment. Dax Burgos from Community Cycles lamented:

That's capitalism. In order to sell you something, in order to keep selling, they have to continue to innovate and, for better or for worse, that's how it is … They push the limits and they slowly start to back up. Whether it be tire size or [handle] bar width, whatever. They keep getting wider, wider, wider, with the bars or tires and then they are like “Whoa! That's too wide!” and they start coming back down. (personal communication, June 14, 2022)

Bronsvoort had a similar revelation, which led him to write “From Marginal Gains to a Circular Revolution: A practical guide to creating a circular cycling economy” (Bronsvoort and Gerrits, 2020). Bronsvoort explained that bicycle manufacturers make “a lot of different little, tiny steps and each of these steps generally reduce the compatibility of previous generations of bicycles and that in turn makes it hard to find replacement parts …” (personal communication, June 1, 2021). The sad reality is that if one part is not available to repair or refurbish a bicycle most people throw away the whole bike.

“There are no standards”

Before writing From Marginal Gains to a Circular Revolution, Bronsvoort tried to create a business of making “new” bikes from old parts but quickly realized that manufacturers have made this impossible with proprietary components:

the toughest thing we ran into was that standards were constantly changing and bike parts were not as compatible as everyone wants us to believe … it became worse with the introduction of disc brakes where all standards were let loose … (personal communication, June 1, 2021)

Hua echoed that standardization of components would go a long way to making the bike industry more environmentally friendly: “the big joke in the cycling industry is that the standard is that there are no standards …” (personal communication, February 15, 2021). The free-for-all approach is a profitable business model because it ensures that bikes can only be ridden for so long, but consumers and the earth pay for these proprietary choices. The lack of standardization can be read as a form of self-erasure and forgetting. A lack of manufacturing standards ensures that there is no memory built into the production process because repairability and compatibility inherently require collective remembrance.

In a Vancouver Sun article on “built-to-fail bikes,” Sarah Thomas, shop manager at Our Community Bikes, said that many consumer-level bikes today are built to last “less than 100 hours of riding” (Luymes, 2022: para. 2). Community bike recycling initiatives are seeing more and more bikes that are unrepairable. Mac Liman, Director of Bikes Together in Denver, Colorado, started a petition calling upon manufacturers to stop the “predatory” practice of making bikes that cannot be disassembled or repaired. The petition reads: “We are tired of telling distraught customers and riders that their bikes are made too poorly to fix, and we are tired of seeing these bikes filling up our waste streams. Frankly, you should be ashamed of selling bikes that last some 90 riding hours” (Petition, n.d.: para. 4). Mechanics are calling for a durability standard of at least 500 riding hours and to “design bikes to be serviceable and hold adjustment, with replaceable and upgradable components” (para. 5). The problem is so bad that Liman and other mechanics refer to these built-to-fail bikes as “bike-shaped objects” (Gordon, 2022: para. 1). But it is not just low-end built-to-fail bikes that are a problem because manufacturers of high-end bikes rely on the crash replacement warranty to keep profits flowing.

Crash replacement

Major bike brands often have crash replacement policies that are distinct from regular warranty issues dealt with by the brand. When customers damage their bike severely enough in an accident companies can offer the opportunity to buy a new frame at a reduced price. The problem, however, is that brands ask customers to prove that their bikes are “unrideable” to receive the replacement bike. Hence, there are photos and videos on social media platforms of bike owners destroying their bikes to fulfill the crash replacement policy. For example, on Golflute's Instagram video (August 31, 2015) someone is shown sawing through a bike frame with the caption reading “you have to destroy the old frame to get the new one.” Crash replacement programs are built on the idea that it is easier for businesses to maintain a customer than find a new one; consequently, customers are lured in with reduced prices.

As a repair technician, Montenegro sees the crash replacement program as a significant barrier to the environmental sustainability of the bike industry because waste is incentivized. For him, offering quality repair services is one way to “disrupt” the mainstream practice of discarding bicycles in exchange for a new one. Montenegro rationalizes his thinking behind offering repairs for life with his Agaromba bike line:

What can I do to disrupt, you know, what all these brands are profiting from? … they break the bike, they will send the bike in a crash replacement price, which is like [I] just got a new bike [at] a discount. The old bike is cut in half [and] put in the trash. This is a bike that could have been fixed for a couple hundred dollars … these companies don’t promote the carbon fiber repair part, just because it's unprofitable for them. (personal communication, May 24, 2021)

The crash replacement warranty again points to a cultural desire to forget products and move on to the next one. Conversely, “Aboriginal cosmopolitanism” encourages us to “[stay] in one place” (Clark, 2008: 4). But staying in one place does not mean a static existence; it means using information from the past to inform the future. It also means evolving in place to respond to the challenges of our present time. In other words, if we are looking for ways to recycle better or technological solutions to waste management, we will never deal with the root causes of our problem as long as we are unwilling to inhabit the space of waste long enough to understand it. Within a capitalist system, waste will always be seen as “an externality to an otherwise efficient system” (Schmidt, 2021: 114). The challenge, then, comes in bringing waste back into a system built on circularity and relationality.

Disrupting the Status Quo: ways forward

In Trek's 2021 Sustainability Report, it writes: “for too long, cycling has been given an environmental pass … Even products that benefit people and the planet leave behind a footprint” (p. 3). Despite significant issues facing the bike industry, it does represent a leading edge for the rest of the sporting goods industry for a different tomorrow because cycling is otherwise such an environmentally friendly activity. In this section, we outline the circular economy and options to bring more circularity into the bike industry.

In a circular economy, Bronsvoort explains companies must “make a disconnection between selling products and making money; and making money by making sure that bikes can stay in use for as long as possible. We need a new business model” (personal Communication, June 1, 2021). Thus, longevity is the business model. We are encouraged to stay in place and learn through remembrance. For the circular economy to work, it requires stringent oversight and regulation to ensure extended producer responsibility. This would mean governments need to mandate that brands take responsibility for the entire lifespan of their products. In turn, brands would be incentivized to create products that are easily repaired, cleaned, and refurbished. Once consumers are finished with their products, they would return them to the brand or store and it would no longer be the consumer's responsibility to recycle, reuse, or donate the item.

Hird (2013) points out that “modern capitalism defines waste entirely within economic terms as ‘simply resources out of place’”; therefore, a circular economy ensures that resources are always in place. Certain countries in Europe and Asia have adopted take-back programs making manufacturers responsible for their products and/or packaging at the end-of-use stage. This is one upstream approach to environmentalism that encourages manufacturers to think about the end-of-use stage as a cost of doing business (Toffel, 2004), and it does require government intervention to have any large-scale impact. For example, we spoke with a representative from one bike company collecting back their used frames; however, as a lone actor there is no infrastructure to support the take-back process and they are left with a warehouse full of bike frames with few renewal options.

Outdoor apparel companies offer us an example of what extended producer responsibility could look like. Patagonia's “Worn Wear” (Patagonia, n.d.) and The North Face's “Renewed” (The North Face Renewed, 2018) e-commerce sites divert products from the landfill and are re-sold after receiving some care, simultaneously promoting environmental sustainability and economic growth. Consumers can trade in their old gear and receive credit towards new or used items; the brands then clean, repair, and renew as many items as possible for re-sale. The raw materials required for sale are reduced, items are re-used, and recycling is made unnecessary and/or a far less significant part of the process.

The North Face provides its Renewed service with the help of The Renewal Workshop (2019), an Oregon-based factory that helps brands and retailers recover value from what has traditionally been considered unsellable products (i.e. warrantied items, returns, e-commerce returns, damaged goods). The renewal of goods offers the possibility of revenue growth by keeping re-sale within the same supply chain, where it is currently outsourced to thrift stores and online sites such as PoshMark. Through renewal, brands can literally sell an item twice (if not more) but only pay for (and extract) the raw materials once. Jeff Denby, the co-founder of The Renewal Workshop, explained at the 2018 World Ethical Apparel Roundtable conference, that renewal also cuts down on the turnaround time for orders because, while making new products can be an 18-month process, renewing existing items can take only a couple of months (personal communication, 2018). Renewal still privileges capital accumulation, but the existing market logic and operations must be fundamentally altered to accommodate circularity as opposed to linear production. Admittedly, these initiatives may not be easy to scale up and do require legitimate investments in time, energy, and money; however, what renewal proves is that we do not have to wait for the science of tomorrow. We can make significant changes with political will today.

But can we renew hard goods like bicycles? There are companies such as Mallinda (based in Colorado) that have new materials available for adoption today but find it difficult getting into the market because of a lack of political will. Mallinda (2022) produces a material called Vitrimax:

Designed to break the 20th-century paradigm of single-use engineering resins, vitrimers are a new class of polymer … [and] lengthens the lifecycle of materials that were previously unrepairable and non-recyclable. There is no material end-of-life, only an ongoing reincarnation cycle of usage opportunities.

When speaking with Mallinda's then Vice-President of Research and Development, Heather Rubin explained “if you want to optimize the design materials you are making, you have to think about the materials you are using …you have to consider the chemistry because the chemistry is where it starts” (personal communication, June 12, 2019). In other words, design is limited by the chemistry and materials available.

According to Mallinda, the adoption of its Vitrimax carbon fiber requires less overall raw materials, and in a proper circular economy, there must be a cap on resource extraction. Mallinda supports government legislation towards a circular economy because that would give them the opportunity to be more competitive against legacy materials such as steel and aluminum. Hence, the eco-modernist proposal that technology (by itself) will save us from environmental catastrophe fails to acknowledge that cutting-edge technology needs to survive in the market long enough to be discovered and that technologies that challenge planned obsolescence do not benefit a linear economy. We acknowledge that Mallinda's work can also be co-opted by eco-modernist approaches to side-step dealing with the larger waste problem by incorporating a new technological development, but it is also relevant to highlight that political will can force innovation. Radical measures, such as anti-consumption, are often dismissed outright because they are too counter normative. Mallinda offers us a bridge to understanding less consumption and circularity as something possible today. This example also opens doors for interdisciplinary research because here the goals of materials engineers can align with sociological work in advocating for government intervention and oversight.

One difficulty for bikes to adopt extended producer responsibility is that bicycles are made of components from different manufacturers complicating what a renewal process might entail. Who would be responsible for collecting what parts? Who would be responsible for repair? Where does the retailer fit into this chain? What happens when a company goes out of business? As Montenegro pointed out, even if the U.S. government legislated companies to enforce a certain level of repairability, approximately 90% of bikes are manufactured in China. In a global world, individual nation-states are limited in their ability to enforce change. However, this issue could be aided with more standardization and compatibility of components. Bronsvoort believes that the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the international governing body of cycling, could offer some leadership in this area because it sets the regulations for competitive cycling. Currently, the guidelines are meant to ensure that no rider can buy “a significantly better bike than [their] competitors,” (personal communication, May 31, 2021) but the UCI could also use its regulatory power to drive sustainability and circularity of materials as part of its governance.

Another example that Bronsvoort promotes is a subscription bike company in Europe called Swapfiets. Swapfiets (2022) leases its bikes, delivers them to the customer, and repairs bikes in 48 h or less. Customers pay a low monthly fixed rate for the use of the bike, but they do not own the bike. Currently, the membership for a 7-speed cruiser bike costs 19.90 GBP per month in London, England. When customers decide they no longer want the bike they cancel their membership and return the bike to one of the Swapfiet stores. Bronsvoort warns that while a model like Swapfiets works well for commuter bikes, it would be very different for road bikes because of how specific they are to the rider's body and needs. Still, he believes that this subscription model would give cyclists peace of mind to ensure that they will always have a properly functioning bike and that help is only a call away. Swafiets could be seen as an example of remembrance through the supply chain through the promotion of repair and extended producer responsibility. However, we could have also said this about bike-sharing programs and now we know that too many bike-sharing programs are as much a part of the problem as built-to-fail bikes. The line between creating a circular economy and facilitating planned obsolescence is a fine one.

None of these options discussed offer us the silver bullet for creating environmentally sustainable bikes and they all need to be further researched to know if they deliver on the environmental promises made. Voluntary attempts at circular solutions can only do so much within a capitalist system but they also show us that a different world is possible; circularity offers us the hope that we need in an otherwise dark environmental forecast Change is iterative; we can build upon these ideas to create the future we want. First, though, we must acknowledge sporting goods as an environmental problem in our collective consciousness before we can solve anything. Second, there needs to be concerted attempts to create regulations and standards with significant industry oversight.

Conclusion

A socio-ethical approach to sporting goods manufacturing and consumption would force us to bring the memory back into the supply chain, and for us to “bear witness to events which we don’t want to remember, nor … be remembered for” (van Wyck as cited in Hird, 2013: 108). To date, the story that our sporting goods reflect is a short-sighted one. Our goal should not be to create “zero-waste” through the neoliberal interpretation of recycling because zero-waste initiatives perpetuate problematic ideals around “purity” (Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022), rather it should be to see a perpetual and relational future for our waste. Or as Hird (2013: 117) writes, “This sense of remembering calls an unknowable future into the present. Remembering in this sense, is as much about the future as it is about the past.” Liboiron and Lepawsky (2022) contend that all economic systems, including communism and socialism, produce waste, thus a better question for us to ask is: “How do you discard well given specific contexts, materialities, and power relations?” (p. 30, original emphasis). For sporting goods, prioritizing repair and challenging traditional notions of ownership provide options for a more just and equitable future with respect to waste.

Waste management and planned obsolescence are all part of the “harmful art” of “self-erasure” (Rose, 2003: 62). To continue down this path both disrespects those who actively work to steward our land and their knowledges. Thus, to continue with a linear economy is to maintain settler colonialism. Discussions about the relationship between sport and the environment must include the materiality of sporting goods as part of the problem and solution. Extended producer responsibility is not the full answer, but it can help us re-conceptualize the ecological footprints we leave behind by demonstrating a collective remembrance as citizens co-existing with interconnected futures, rather than reproducing our individuality as consumers. It does not necessarily mean that we leave no traces of our presence, but rather than our presence and activities are not so selfish, destructive, and/or thoughtless that they require self-erasure. This is a call to action for governments to legislate change; for brands and manufacturers to design with the end in mind; for marketers to create value through repair and renewal; and, for consumers to consume less and demand end-of-use options from brands that do not involve the landfill.

With this last point in mind, we would finally suggest that researchers interested in extending our research into bicycles, waste, and options for more environmentally friendly production and consumption focus next on consumer-cyclist perspectives. Such research might consider how (the potential for) changing modes of production and increased accountability are understood by cyclists, what cyclists might “give up” and how they might “choose differently” with bike-related environmental issues in mind, and how being a member of any number of sub-communities of cyclists might impact choices. The range of perspectives amongst cyclists, a very diverse group overall (see Steinmann and Wilson, 2022), is especially important to attend to here—as undoubtedly differently positioned cyclists would see issues raised through this paper differently, and have varying levels of willingness to respond to these issues. Knowledge gleaned from such research would be crucial as we consider the potential within and around cycling for enhanced forms of environmental activism to complement what we hope will be more concrete policy changes and accountability frameworks for the cycling producers and distributors that were the focus of the research reported in this paper.