Paper Bike Rider

So, let’s imagine you’re all set to take the next step in your conversion to green living. Instead of driving to work, you’ve decided to ride your bike, giving yourself some much-needed exercise, bypassing the consumption of precious petroleum, sparing the earth a few tons of greenhouse-gas exhaust fumes (except for the carbon dioxide that you huff-and-puff out of your own lungs), and doing your small part to reduce traffic. Great!

But what about the bike itself? Its manufacture produced its own share of greenhouse gases, it used up more of the earth’s metals, and if it’s any kind of decent bike, it’ll probably be stolen eventually. Perhaps you’ve made the wrong decision.

Unless you take this approach:

Young Phil Bridge, a soon-to-be-graduating student at England’s Sheffield Hallam University, was concerned about the frequent theft of bikes in the U.K. So he decided to make himself some two-wheeled transportation out of recycled and easily recyclable materials. A cardboard bike!

Now pretty is isn’t. A chick magnet it most certainly is not. (Although the same could have been said about the Prius, and now it’s a status symbol for Leo DiCaprio and others.) But the bike is made (mostly) of an easily renewable resource, and supposedly cost only $30. The tires, wheels, chain and gears are made from standard metal parts. Oh, and the seat, too. I’m hoping there wasn’t even a test-prototype with a cardboard seat. Ouch.

Regular box cardboard isn’t strong enough, so Bridge used something called hexacomb cardboard, which has the additional utility of being waterproof. I’m not sure I’d want to be the one to test this claim by taking this thing for a ride in the rain.

The bike will hold anyone who weighs less than 168 lbs, and Bridge, who made the bike as part of his degree program in Product Design, is looking for investors to try and sell the bike commercially. I can see and hear the ads now, to the tune of the Beatles “Paper Back Writer” — “Paper Bike Rider.”