Any reasons for hopefulness on actually Shifting Cycling Culture?

🚨 EC Podcasts
1

On the recent circular-economics episode, the folks interviewed by @Suvi_Loponen sounded hopeful, but I didn’t come away with much hope. I remember being inspired by a podcast that James did on circular economy back in the Nerd Alert days at TheOldPlace, but I think since then I’ve begun to think that significant change along these lines in cycling industry is less plausible.

As many have observed, bikes are really durable, most of them don’t wear out, and apart from a few countries with regular daily cycling it seems like a lot of the industry’s profit is made selling incrementally-improved performance machines to people who already had slightly-less-new performance machines. As much as we can joke about It’s All About Performance, the incentives are real for racers to not be at a disadvantage.

But even if:

  1. most cycling-as-pastime folks fully embraced the durability of bikes
  2. some portion of highly performance-incentivized folks focused first on optimizing bike around the rider and pushed shiny-new-equipment to later
  3. cycling culture became uniquely inoculated against advertising consumerism

it seems like it might become even more true that most industry profit comes from the people who want, or are willing, to buy new-and-improved equipment every 2-3 product cycles.

Which is to say, I’ve mostly seen the incentives for manufacturers as running counter to less-environmental-impact. Truly Shifting Cycling Culture as the folks who work there (and myself) would like to see would mostly mean a smaller pie for the industry. There are cases where lower-environmental-impact products have real gains (if the Parcours vibration-damping wheels with recycled CF in the rim bed catch on), but I have a difficult time seeing that becoming common.

Am I missing some reasons for hope, and are parts of my analysis overly pessimistic?

2

My previous gig before returning to the cycling industry full-time was in sustainability. One of the main issues and hurdles (as it relates to larger companies at least) is that you can’t assign shareholder wealth to sustainability improvements - shareholders want to see year-on-year growth which equals return on their investment. Sustainability does not do that, therefore companies struggle to do anything more than the bear minimum, which simply is not enough.

Until that model changes (which, let’s face it, ain’t gonna happen), sustainability will only ever be a tick-box exercise where the bear minimum requirements are met.

Most companies actually just spend a fortune in offsets too, which doesn’t actually achieve much.

The example I like is Patagonia. Making clothes is one of the worst things you can do in terms of environmental impact. As a clothing manufacturer they’re doing better than most in terms of sustainability improvements and offsets, but they’re still making clothes - so do they really care about the environment?

Then there’s us as consumers, who often like to believe we’re doing everything we can, but then can’t even put our waste in the right recycling bins, or go out and buy an EV thinking that buying a new EV is better than maintaining an existing car (just an example, not a discussion for this thread!).

It’s hard to be anything but pessimistic when we’ve made so little progress.

2 Likes