Friday, 29 March 2024
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Bicycle Association partners ERP for battery collection and recycling service

The Bicycle Association has revealed that it will set up an electric bike battery collection and recycling offshoot to its services.

One market sector that has not yet shown sustained signs of post-Covid era retreat, the electric bike space remains in a long-view ascendancy and is expected to continue to become ever-more important to the UK bicycle market’s retailers and suppliers. With this in mind, end of life battery discussions are a hot topic and many retailers find themselves hanging on to old batteries, which can prove unsafe if not stored correctly.

With this in mind, the BA is again acting as a middleman to connect bike businesses to its chosen company, ERP UK, which will now take delivery of bike industry cells.

Stephen Holt, Bicycle Association Retail Trade Manager, said: “With millions of electric bike sales ahead of us, this is an exciting initiative that will make it easy for retailers to safely store faulty and expired batteries in one fireproof rated drum – with one phone call when full to get it swapped out. With the support of electric bike producers, we hope to provide a national network of hundreds of collection points convenient for customers.

“We are looking forward to working closely with ERP, who are experts in the construction and implementation of such initiatives.”

John Redmayne, Managing Director of ERP UK said: “ERP UK are delighted to have been chosen by the Bicycle Association as their partner in developing a battery collection service for the sector.With growing numbers of E-bikes in use, the need for the sector to safely and responsibly deal with end of life batteries has been highlighted.  We are looking forward to working with the Association and using our experience in engineering circular economy solutions to develop a sector-specific service.”

The BA and ERP will begin a trial shortly, the learnings from which will contribute to a proposed national rollout later this year.

Aside from the BA’s recycling scheme there is intention for mass recycling of eBike batteries with a handful of other businesses, most notably listed specialist Technology Minerals, which has just recently obtained an environmental licence for a recycling plant in Wolverhampton for handling lithium-ion cells. Meanwhile, Specialized has partnered with EcoLamp in order to handle its end of life battery flow.