By Lara Maxwell
With a goal to decrease its environmental footprint, the president of Trek Bicycle, John Burke, conducted an emissions report to “better understand our impact and build a plan to become a more conscious and sustainable global citizen,” according to the 2021 Trek Sustainability Report.
Trek, which is headquartered in Wisconsin, partnered with WAP Sustainability Consulting and measured Trek’s emissions impact over a year. The company looked at multiple factors such as fuel and electricity used at facilities, transportation and distribution, business travel and emissions related to the production of four of their top-selling bicycle models.
The report states, “Every bike leaves a carbon footprint in raw materials and transportation. The good news is that the carbon cost of manufacturing a bike can be mitigated or entirely offset when it’s used to its potential. … We not only determined the emissions caused by the production of our bikes and components, but also identified where we can improve our manufacturing and supply chain processes.” Courtney Munch, the lead product sustainability specialist for Trek Bicycles, said Trek is releasing a new report with new data sometime within the next month.
Munch said that carbon footprints are broken down into three scopes. “Scope One is everything you’re directly responsible for creating, so that would be all our owned and operated facilities. Scope Two is all the energy you use, so that would be the energy for our owned and operated facilities plus the energy we use to light our retail stores or the energy used for BCycle to go out and get their bikes and bring them back to ports. Scope Three is everything upstream and downstream in the value chain, which is why it’s the biggest, especially for a product-making company. So that would be everything our suppliers create as far as carbon goes, and everything our consumers create — basically the entire lifetime of the bike.”
Trek established The Trek Foundation in 2021 to help protect existing trails and the surrounding habitat — and establish new trails. The company is pursuing land that could be scheduled for development in the future, Munch said.
BCycle, a sister company to Trek, is a public bicycle sharing company. BCycle allows users to borrow bicycles for shorter trips around town, with stations where one can check out and return the bikes. “You can go about your way without actually having to own the bike, lug it back and forth and have to maintain it,” Munch said.
The term, shift cycling mode share “is jargon for more people on bikes and fewer in cars,” Munch said. “That’s one of the central missions of the company in general, not just for sustainability but trying to get people more active and less sedentary, but also just out of cars and out there in nature.”
For bicycles to truly have a positive environmental impact, there needs to be a shift in how people commute. Utilizing the bicycle to its full potential and as an alternative mode of transportation is environmentally healthy. “If you ride about 430 miles you would have otherwise driven, you’ve saved the carbon equivalent of what it took to make your bike,” the Trek report stated.
To get people to use bikes for commuting transportation, there needs to be a way for people to get from point A to point B in places that are designed for cars. Trek is “investing in infrastructure that makes it easier and safer for millions to choose bikes,” according to their report. Even a shift of 1% toward bicycle use would have a carbon reduction impact of about 17 times Trek’s global carbon yearly footprint, Munch said.
“I think sustainability has been a really cool breakthrough,” she said. “Since sustainability can be an added value, like a competitive advantage in selling the bike. … So it’s been a cool gateway into being a lot more transparent about what we are doing and what kind of impacts we are having.” She said that the sharing of sustainability information helps other companies have the information available to them even if it isn’t tailored to them.
“I think telling the brands you like what you want to see for sustainability, or just that it matters, is going to make a big difference,” Munch said. “I think letting brands know that it’s something people are starting to expect from their products would go a long way.”
Pull quote: For bicycles to truly have a positive environmental impact, there needs to be a shift in how people commute. Utilizing the bicycle to its full potential and as an alternative mode of transportation is environmentally healthy. “If you ride about 430 miles you would have otherwise driven, you’ve saved the carbon equivalent of what it took to make your bike.”
2021 Trek Sustainability Report
