The West Coast’s cleverest Chimp has a new piece of gear for your longride. It’s a bag for the empty pocket above the wheel and below the deck. I’ve wondered before and now I wonder again if those “truck tarps” are pre- or post-consumer? Environmentally, vinyl bites, and urethane is the preferred waterproof material. But if you’re just re-using a discarded tarp, I guess it’s kinda like re-using the grease that comes out of the back end of McDonalds…
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So far it’s been virgin vinyl, tricky coyote, unless you count the fact that prototypes 2-4 were cannibalizations of previous iterations materially. I’m open to other materials, particularly if they can be sewn with similar ease; one nice feature of truck tarp is that cut edges can be left raw without fraying or ripping, unlike most woven materials. Aaron in Seattle said he found a lot of truck tarp squares in a dumpster once. Would it be OK if they were institutional cafeteria tray vomit pink?
The larger question of ecologically appropriate materials and processes is a constant balancing game that I intend to keep playing, with more and more obvious wins as the rounds proceed. I do think there’s a risk of “local optimization” if such concerns tend to drag down the greater good of supporting a viable alternative to (vinyl-upholstered) automotive travel, and I’m having enough trouble doing the latter — staying in the game — that I see the challenge of finding and testing beeswax-impregnated hemp canvas or whatnot to be a distraction, at the outset anyway. Same thing with flying for business purposes, chrome plating, sourcing parts from entities of dubious environmental beneficence, and delivering via UPS, whose trucks may or may not be full often enough.
Besides, what fun is it if you can’t leap back and forth from Aristotelian to Kantian ethical reasoning as required?
One more thing, since I’m started: concern for the natural environment is not the primary driver of my interest in bicycling and disdain for cars, and this influences my problem-solving process. I don’t see emissions and similar toxicities as the main problem with cars, nor even the geopolitical complications of fueling them with nonrenewable resources. These are all big and important problems, and I’ll be happy if Stokemonkey can help mitigate them in any way. But my main driver is what cars do to the built environment and to human psyches, bodies, and communities by virtue of their sheer mass, size, speed, and power, and conversely what bikes do on those same things. If push came to shove in a magic world, I’d pick light, small, slowish, partly or wholly human powered bikes as the default local transportation mode for the masses over sunshine-powered Prius-like hypercars for everybody, even if the bikes were made of really nasty stuff and the Prius’s came in and out of the compost heap.
The previous stock of PET-based electronics enclosures have been Freecycled. They’ll be part of a kid’s science lab.
UPS isn’t so bad in it’s execution of truck based-shipping. I work at a UPS sorting hub, and nearly every trailer we send out that’s not time-critical gets filled 95-100%. Tractors often pull 2 trailers, and most are older than I am. The largest hub in the country, Chicago Area Consolidation Hub, has it’s own rail yard in addition to trucks.
Now if only I can convince them to let me do local deliveries on my X, then we’d be getting somewhere.
I’ve always dreamed of UPS going the final mile (or few) by cargo bike. I know they or maybe DHL or maybe everyone does it to some degree in Europe.
Hypalon is a material that’s easy to sew and is greener than PVC. The edges can be left unbound. What’s more, we have some extra from years past. Tell me the pattern size and maybe I can send you some.
The Swedish post office has 7000 bikes and 1400 electric cars for letter carrying. Rail transport saves 4600 tons of CO2 annually for the post office.
http://www.posten.se/index.jsp?PageName=op_miljo_resultataktivitet&parentId=60&level2Id=254&level3Id=302&level3pos=3&level2pos=6&val=o
I’ve been discussing this on misc.transport.urban-transit and some guys from the USA keep saying “oh it can’t be done” or “oh it wouldn’t work in the USA” which is really quite annoying. We never seem to be told why it wouldn’t work. I mean, I see it being done. It works.