Electric cars cause more pollution than petrol ones

[homeforsummer]

You do realize that it takes a bunch of really nasty chemical processes to make cardboard, right?

In fairness, it takes a lot of everything to make pretty much anything. I don't have any figures to hand, but I suspect whether you make a bike out of cardboard, metal, plastics, CFRP, or unicorn horn, it's gonna require a lot of expended energy.

The benefit of the cardboard bike is, I suspect, that it's incredibly cheap to buy for the end user, quick and cheap to build for the manufacturer (nasty chemicals or not), and probably fairly easy to ship too.

If you're taking a holistic view of improving environmental credentials, something light, quick to make and cheap enough to make people think twice about more expensive, less clean methods of transportation is actually a pretty good one.

 

[niky]

Indeed. It's not that cardboard production is any less toxic than plastic production or metal refining... it's that it's cheap. An add-on benefit is that using cardboard bikes doesn't really use up much of our precious metal or oil resources.

What I'd like to see is a lifetime usage study of such a contraption. It's already known that carbon-fiber and wood-composite bikes don't last quite as long as alloy frames. The question is how much less life do you get out of them?

I envision a future where our motor vehicles look vastly different from the overly large, heavy and expensive conveyances we use today. gas-electric or diesel-electric hybrids with four seats, composite construction and weighing only 1,000 pounds... or diesel-electric-human-power hybrids with two seats and weighing only 200 pounds or so...

No one has range anxiety when their cars get over 300 mpg. Road rage will lessen when crash damage becomes as inconsequential as banging together trash bins on the curb.

It could happen. But given how everyone is obsessed with the status symbol side of motoring... it probably won't. Not until long after it should.