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The $9 Cardboard bike could enable billions of bikes to fight poverty and improve the environment
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FastCo Design – Izhar Gafni has designed award winning industrial machines for peeling pomegranates and sewing shoes. He’s also a bike enthusiast who’s designed a lot of carbon fiber rigs. But one day, he’d heard about someone who’d built a cardboard canoe.
Izhar created the Alfa cardboard bike. The Alfa weighs 20lbs, yet supports riders up to 24 times its weight. It’s mostly cardboard and 100% recycled materials, yet uses a belt-driven pedal system that makes it maintenance free. And, maybe best of all, it’s project designed to be manufactured at about $9 to $12 per unit (and just $5 for a kids version)
LA Times – Izhar hopes to put the bike into mass production in the next three months.
Water proof and strong as wood
Gafni says the bike is strong, durable, fireproof and waterproof. And because it is made of cardboard, it will also be cheap. Gafni's business partner Nimrod Elmis told Reuters that he expects the bike to sell at retail stores for $20.
The trick to make it strong was bending and gluing the cardboard in such a way that it becomes strong like a piece of wood. In a video about Gafni and his cardboard bike, Gafni describes the process as a type of origami, and demonstrates how his cardboard is strong enough to support a car.
If you fold cardboard once, and it’s not just twice the strength, it’s three times the strength.
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2012-10-19 00:23:47 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/10/the-9-cardboard-bike.html
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