Meet a Stirling based social enterprise, a thriving community project that has turned bicycle recycling into a major benefit for local people.
In a nutshell…
It’s all about getting recycled bicycles into communities, creating employment opportunities as we go.
The story so far…
We started out in 2006 as a small recycling social enterprise that quickly grew into a job club using the bike recycling as work experience. Now we’ve added in training services, supporting a bike hire service and cycling outreach work, as well as bike recycling and sales.
The most recent addition is a lovely community café.
So what happens?
At some point someone will decide that they don’t want their bike any more. Maybe they are upgrading or a child has grown out if it. If it’s suitable to be refurbished it will come to our workshop for a full service. It might get replacement parts, which could be stripped from other bikes. We’ll wash it and put it into our shop and hopefully someone else will come along and love it again! Last year we refurbished 1400 bikes in our workshop.
The difference we make
Instead of that bicycle ending up in landfill, it’s getting used again. It becomes a mode of transport for someone so could be an alternative to the car, helping reduce carbon emissions. Also a reused bike instead of a new bike has less impact on the environment.
What matters to us?
Put simply, we really want to get more people into work and more bikes into the community. Our aims are to help people, our local community and environment by:
- supporting people into employment, education, training and volunteering
- helping more people to choose cycling for low carbon transport, better health and wellbeing, and of course for fun
- stopping bikes ending up in landfill.
Angela Barron
Chief Executive, Recyke-a-Bike