Reid Bikes to plant a tree for every bike sold globally

Reid Bikes has introduced a new environmental offset pledge in which it will plant a tree for every bicycle that it sells.

Hailing from Australia, where wild fires have ravaged the landscape for weeks already, Reid is acutely aware of the affects of climate change and as such has made the pledge. Trees are of course known carbon sinks and go some way to absorbing emissions. The season’s wild fires have already unlocked two-thirds of Australia’s annual ‘carbon budget’ in lost forest alone.

The initiative extends worldwide, writes Reid on its website, where it says: “We have responsibility as a good-manufacturing business to offset the carbon that we are using to make our already sustainable products, bikes and what better way to do this than planting a tree. With forests worldwide being chopped down and burnt for the use of man, we want to ensure that our children and our children’s children can still enjoy the outdoors as we have and as nature intended. This is more of a moral obligation for us than a business choice.”

The partner for the tree planting will be EdenProjects.org, a non-profit organisation with 265 million planted trees already on the ground. The organisation pays fair wage to those in some of the world’s poorest areas as part of its bid to reforest sections of the earth.

The bike industry is increasingly rounding behind the common cause of reducing emissions and waste, with some participating in recent strikes, while others are making more material contributions on things like packaging reduction and manufacturing efficiency.

On the subject of cycling’s carbon footprint, utilising its globally-sourced commute data, Strava was able to attribute a carbon offset against its members’ cycling habits. The data firm calculated the 507.1 million kilometres logged on its platform to be worth 127,304 metric tonnes of carbon saved.