Given the urgency of the climate crisis, the role that businesses have to play in combatting this issue is increasingly important.
Ride Clean was founded with sustainability at the heart of its mission and operations. Through our work we contribute to 3 of the UN’s SDGs: good health and well-being, sustainable cities and communities and climate action. In this blog post we want to take you through how we form part of the Circular Economy through our reuse, repair, recycle, maintain approach.
CC 3.0 Catherine Weetman 2016
Let’s start from the beginning
Firstly as a company, we encourage transportation by bike. When we chose our bikes over cars, we don’t contribute to air and noise pollution.
Secondly, many people don’t realise that cleaning your bike regularly keeps it in good condition and means that your bike components last longer. This is because you are more likely to spot any issues before they develop and because a cleaner bike runs more smoothy, reducing wear. As a result you will not need to purchase new parts as often and less waste is generated.
When it comes to getting to our clients, we travel everywhere using our cargo bikes which we charge using renewable sources of energy.
The cleaning process itself is also carried out with environmental concerns at the heart. We source our cleaning rags from a local textile bank instead of buying them brand new. Once we’ve used these rags, we send them off to be recycled (by cargo bike)
The cleaning products we use are locally sourced. This vastly reduces emissions from transportation. When cleaning your bike, we don’t opt for the cheapest and most most aggressive. While this might get the job done faster, the run off caused would be a lot more harmful to the environment and is worse for your bike as well.
We know that water is an increasingly scarce resource so we mindful not to be wasteful.
Since we clean your bikes on the streets of London, we were concerned about run-off as we don’t want to be contributing to water pollution. So we got some environmental experts from local authorities to check this out for us. They concluded that most of the dirt we wash off is pollution from the roads, that our minimal use of eco-friendly cleaning products have minimal direct impact, but the efficiency gains of a clean bike has positive environmental benefit.
And finally, once we’re done cleaning bikes for the day we make sure we’ve left no rubbish on the street. We collect any rubbish and dispose of it using our cargo bike.
These practices are in our are key to our mission and even though they might be a little more time or , we know it’s worth it because we have a duty to safeguard the future of our planet.
If you like the sound of what we do, follow us on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook or book an appointment to get your bike cleaned, the clean way!