Recycle your bicycle for Africa
Add article to favourites
Millions of bicycles are thrown away or are unused in garages across the UK. Meanwhile, many people in Africa have no access to transport of any kind.
It can take up to 4 hours a day to walk to collect water or go to school, so imagine what difference a bicycle could make!
One company, Re~Cycle collects second hand bicycles and ships them to Africa. They have currently recycled 30,000 bikes to African families who need them.
Their partners distribute bikes and teach riders the skills to repair and maintain them. The bikes also help health/AIDS workers reach remote villages and even provide an ambulance service in remote Namibia.
When you’re next decluttering your garage or shed, keep Re-Cycle in mind. You can find out more about their drop off point in Colchester on their ‘how to donate a bike‘ page
If you can’t get to Colchester to donate your bike, then you’ll also find a helpful list of other bicycle re-use projects on the same page.
Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:
How to recycle old tools You know I live with a hoarder, right? I'd love to show you a picture of…
Don’t throw it away… That's rubbish, just throw it away ... How many times have you heard that or said…
Recycle your old computer (E waste) responsibly Do you know how to recycle an old computer?
FAQs Here are some of our most common FAQs. Please read through these before sending us a…
Zero Waste Week 2013 Welcome to the sixth National Zero Waste Week! National Zero Waste Week takes place week beginning…
Easy Related Posts
Tags: tips
Great to hear this is happening in the UK.
Local to me in one of the Boston neighborhoods we have a similiar program that for 25 years have shipped bikes to Central America, Caribbean, Africa and New Orleans. They also to a lot of work with local youth (and my favoite bike shop).
Opps the web link show’s up as a link to my name and isn’t obvious – to learn more:
http://bikesnotbombs.org/
@Deb from Boston: Great to hear of these schemes in others countries, Deb. Thank you for the link! The title of their site is very emotive 🙂
Hi this is a wonderful idea. Yes so many people in Africa can make use of the products that we discard as waste. What is just an unwanted item for us could be something of extremely high value to many people there. So we need to value the things that we have from this perspective and always search for ways to properly give away the things that we don’t need.
Thanks for the wonderful information.
Joost Hoogstrate
Hi Joost,
Welcome to the site. I agree with you; it’s time to view our ‘waste’ as a resource as inevitably it is; to someone or for some project. Even to ourselves if we think outside the box more.
That’s why Freecycle is so popular too I guess 🙂
Hello,
Thanks for the article.
I set up Re~Cycle. Its a charity, rather than a company Well, is both a charity and a company at the same time, though it is not “a company”.
There’s also a search-able system for finding local bike projects, and we’re working on a How To guide for people to set up and run their own.
Cheers
Merlin
@Merlin Matthews: Hi Merlin, welcome to the site and well done on setting up the charity. Thanks for putting me right about the charity / company status.
Your How To guides sounds like a great addition to the site. Let me know when they are up and we can give your site another plug!
The bicycle is one of the few ‘vice free’ pieces of modern technology, so shipping surplus bikes to the third world is a great idea.
One question about your article though; why pick a photo of an american ‘Revopower’ bike with a polluting two-stroke petrol engine built into its front wheel hub?
@Ted_F: Hi Ted, I will add my ‘photo for illustrative purposes only’ part here then :D. No reason for the picture at all; it was just one of the first ones I found that fitted. You clearly know a lot more about bicycles than I do 😉