The Environmental Impact of Riding a Bike to Work

The author of a recent article is thinking of switching his commute “from four wheels to two” but he’s concerned about the environmental impact of bicycling: specifically, “about all the energy it takes to manufacture and ship a new bicycle.”

According to the article, it's difficult to say exactly how much greenhouse gas making a bicycle requires, but a recent study at MIT estimated that manufacturing an average bicycle results in the emission of approximately 530 pounds of greenhouse gases. Another researcher came up with a total carbon footprint of one ton of carbon dioxide-equivalents for every $1,000 of manufacturing cost. These two estimates intersect at a bike that costs $265 to build—well within the range of manufacturing costs for the wide variety of bicycles on the market.

So the goal is to trim about 530 pounds of CO2 emissions from your commute. There's been a lot of discussion about how biking or walking might not be so eco-friendly because your body burns more calories during those activities than while driving. But you'd have to be eating an all-beef diet to offset the environmental benefits of walking or bicycling. Given a "typical U.S. diet," you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint.

Calculating the total environmental impact of a mode of transit, however, involves more than just the easy-to-measure metrics like mileage per gallon. To get a full sense of the comparative eco-friendliness of bicycles and cars, you have to consider additional factors like their toll on the roadways, useful lifetime, and maintenance costs.

Measuring the full carbon footprint of commuting by bike using life-cycle assessment, the analytical tool that environmental consultants employ to compare products that are often very different, it has been concluded that an ordinary saloon car's carbon footprint is more than 10 times greater than a conventional bicycle on a mile-for-mile basis, assuming each survives 15 years and you ride the bike 2,000 miles per year (or slightly under eight miles per weekday).

A huge portion of that difference came from fuel combustion, but bicycles also require less infrastructure than cars. It has been calculated that building, paving, and maintaining roads for cars emits almost four times the greenhouse gases as doing the same for bike lanes.

Bikes also damage roads far less than cars do. A heavy bicycle weighs around 30 pounds, just under 1 percent of the weight of a Toyota Prius and less than 0.4 percent of the weight of a Hummer. Simply put, your bike isn't exactly tearing up the asphalt.

Bicycles aren't maintenance-free, but the occasional brake-pad replacement and cable adjustment are responsible for one-sixteenth as much carbon emissions as all the oil and tyre changes and maintenance that cars require.

Read the full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2300676/

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