Craig Calfee

What are some of the challenges of making an eco-friendly bicycle?

Bamboo is challenging because you're dealing with tubes that aren't consistently round or straight. A lot of hand labor goes into them, and that takes time. We're looking into having our bikes produced in Taiwan, where we get our bamboo, and where there's a long history of working with the material.

How did you get into making bikes initially?

Twenty years ago, I crashed my Schwinn Varsity in a head-on collision in Boston. A Pontiac Firebird didn't see me coming down a hill. My bike took all the impact and I flipped over the car and landed on my feet. So I needed a new bike. I was making boats out of carbon fiber at the time, so I made myself a carbon-fiber bike and got started that way.

How did you come up with the idea to make a bicycle out of bamboo?

I'd heard about some people in the U.S. who'd tried to make one 100 years go. It wasn't a very successful design, so I never took it too seriously. Then one day about ten years back, I was out playing with my dog Luna, who was part pit bull, and I was swinging her around by this piece of bamboo. I was amazed that Luna wasn't able to gouge the stick, and I thought, hey, maybe this stuff is strong enough to make a bicycle with.

In what ways are your bamboo bikes "green"?

The bikes are made with bamboo and hemp fiber. Those are the top two fibers that can be produced from bad soil. Both are quickly renewable resources—bamboo takes about three years to grow new and hemp only one. We get our hemp from Romania, which has an old tradition of making hemp rope and fabric, and our bamboo comes from Taiwan. In Taiwan, the bamboo is smoked, which is a pretty interesting way to preserve things. The bamboo sequesters the carbon from the smoke rather than polluting the air, so the process is carbon neutral. It's similar to smoking fish. The process kills all the microbes and insects in the bamboo and stabilizes the moisture content. That means the bamboo won't rot or split. The bamboo bike gets people to think about using natural materials, and it's a good bike to have if you're sociable, because people stop to talk to you about it all the time. And of course the bamboo bicycle is green because it's non-polluting, the same as any bike.

You're about to go to Ghana to help local entrepreneurs set up bamboo-bike-making shops. How do you see bamboo bikes improving the lives of Africans?

Bikes are as useful to many Africans as cars or trucks are to us. In Ghana, people tend to carry things on their heads. Access to bicycles means that people can carry agricultural products, like big bags of cocoa, to markets, or they can take their kids to school, or neighbors to a polling station to vote. We designed a simple, customized African bamboo bike that can carry up to 600 pounds. The bikes available there now are mainly donations—junky bicycles that spent years sitting in Westerners' garages and can't take heavy loads. Africans don't have spare parts to fix them when they break, so the bicycles generally don't last long. Having people who know how to make our bikes in Ghana makes sense because the process makes use of bamboo, which is all over the place, and it doesn't require any electricity. Lots of development projects in Africa never get off the ground because they require power, which lots of rural communities don't have. We're working on sourcing standardized parts so that the trained builders will be able to maintain the bicycles in their communities.

What are your top three tips for safe cycling on busy roads?

Number one, watch out for big trucks. Assume they're going to run you over, especially if you're riding alongside one. Number two, look for heads in parked cars. If I'm riding in a city and see a head in the driver's seat of a parked car, I know that door will probably be opening right when I'm passing it, so I make a detour. Number three, always wear a helmet.

What is the most recent green habit that you've adopted in your own life?

We've been doing this for a while, but as a business owner, I try to make sure we reuse boxes. We can send a bicycle in a used box, and it doesn't seem to matter to the end-user or give a negative impression. Since we use lots of boxes around here, that means we can reuse a large number of boxes before they need to be recycled.

Do you have an eco-sin—a guilty pleasure that isn't green?

If I'm traveling and rent a really nice car, I like to test it out, although it's not strictly necessary. A sort of pedal to the metal type of thing.

Often Americans use bikes for sport but not as a mode of transportation. How could we take a more utilitarian approach to cycling?

If jobs were closer to where people lived, that would make a big difference. But the major reason why people don't bike more is the way cars treat bikers on the road. If you go to Holland, it's the opposite. Bikers kind of own the roads there. It's hard to even find a place to park your car. In the U.S., we need to create more bike paths. Cities like Portland, San Francisco, and Boston are pretty good for bikers. New York City is surprisingly reasonable now, and that's because of the sheer numbers of people who are beginning to ride there. Enforcement is really the only answer. In San Francisco, they created a bike lane on Valencia Street, and cars immediately used it as a place to double-park. It wasn't until drivers started to get tickets that they stopped. Publicity campaigns and enforcement are essential to making cities bike-friendly.