Last week saw the observance of Earth Day here in the Tricites. Port Coquitlam handed out compost bags while most of us were reminded to combine our shopping trips and reduce our carbon footprint. But one local guy combines the “reuse” part of the 3 R’s and creates incredibly cool forms of carbon-free transportation.
Ryan Cousineau finds old junk bikes that are headed for the landfill and fixes them up. Ryan started riding a bike to work in 2001, and started out just maintaining his commuter bikes. This led to scrounging bikes from garage sales, the trash, and through friends at his bike club.
As Ryan gained more experience in bike building, he turned to building bikes for people with special needs, people that weren’t being served by the standard bikes you’ll find in the store. One recent example was a friend’s young daughter wanted a racing bike. Unfortunately, they don’t make racing bikes small enough. So after finding a small frame and a bunch of random parts, the result was this…
Check out more pictures of the process here.
Here’s a photo slideshow with a few of the various bike projects that Ryan has taken on.
Ryan is always on the lookout for well build bikes of the 1970′s that can be restored, and once the bikes are finished he resells them. Not only would you end up with a unique bike, but one less bike would go to the landfill and you now have a handy carbon-free form of transportation. It doesn’t get better for the earth than that.
Want to learn more? You can contact Ryan at rcousine (at) gmail.com or visit his website at www.wiredcola.com.
Once you get that bike on the road, make sure you sign up for the Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation Wheel to Heal coming up on May 16th. We’ll be talking more about it leading up to the big day.
