Our Rides : Bamboo Bicycle

Our Rides – Bamboo Bicycle

¨Hey, is that actually made from wood??¨ ¨Es de caña??¨

These phrases seem to follow us recurrently on our way to the very center of the question: ¿what is Buenos Aires and these Porteños all about?

At Biking Buenos Aires we deliver immersive cultural experiences on two wheels, and those two wheels are spinning over bamboo cane frames. We chose to rely on locally sourced materials, and witty design in order to add a unique flow to a unique experience.

Why Bamboo?

Bamboo is the fastest-growing plant on earth, so reforesting for used raw materials is pretty cheap and accessible. Bamboo offers a light, flexible, and highly resistant material to craft bicycles, and is found worldwide. Also, bamboo is an organic material (duh) so it doesn’t pollute the environment.

Bamboo is being used in various countries around the world as a main component of bicycles. For example, here in Argentina there’s a company called Malon, who nowadays export their bikes to Europe. You may see their bikes riding around Barcelona. These guys use bamboo from Iguazu region, and Tigre (visit this unique ecosystem on our Tigre Bike & Kayak tour), and produce a variety of bike frames – urban, chopper, cross-country.

Some of our bamboo bikes were built in Mexico by Bamboocycle. Diego is a Mexican entrepreneur who wished to travel, and he found a way to do it: providing courses around Latin America on how to build your own bamboo frame. He uses a species of bamboo found in Mexico which is awesome for bike frames, and uses beeswax to protect them.

Another awesome bamboo bike project is called Pampro Bikes. This social enterprise founded in Ghana designs and produces bamboo bikes relying on local labor, in order to reduce unemployment and give worker´s a fair wage and skills for their future. They went farther by donating 150 bikes to students in rural schools, so that they can get to school! This is being done through a partnership with UNICEF.

Bamboo in the Future

With today’s environmental challenges, initiatives like Pampro are being thought of as key viable solutions. Worldwide, people are looking for alternatives that don’t generate waste, and if they can help vulnerable communities in the process, all the better!

I wonder if you´ve seen images of the massive bike cemeteries in China? Bamboo bike production would eliminate the problem of the amount of waste generated,  and how this waste is processed. We strongly believe that choosing sustainable materials in production processes will become more common as time goes by. We wish to broaden people´s minds and have them consider a different, more sustainable way of buying, biking, traveling, living.

Come discover Buenos Aires without generating waste, come Biking Buenos Aires.

Bamboo Bikes – Our Rides