Bamboo may be ride out of poverty

from The Cincinnati Post

By J. Michael Kennedy
Los Angeles Times

Funny where an idea will take you. Ten years ago, Luna the dog - part pit bull and part Labrador retriever - was gnawing on a piece of bamboo growing behind Craig Calfee's bicycle shop outside Santa Cruz, Calif.

At the end of June, Calfee was slated to make a trip to the West African nation of Ghana, intent on making bamboo bikes for the desperately poor. Chew toy to bicycle. Whimsy to good deed. Santa Cruz to Ghana.

Not that this story is anywhere near finished. It's still anybody's guess whether something will come of this project. Which brings us back to Luna, may she rest in peace. Luna was adept at crushing wooden sticks with her powerful jaws. Give her a piece of wood, and she would chew it to splinters in no time. But the best she could manage with the hard, round stalks of bamboo was a tooth mark or two. And that got Calfee to wondering: If bamboo was strong enough to withstand Luna, why couldn't it be a bicycle frame?

Since then, Calfee has gone from building clunker bamboo bikes to fashioning sleek, pricey racing machines that turn heads in even the snobbiest pace lines. He's built 91 bamboo bicycles, enough for their reputation to spread across the country.

Calfee is no ordinary bicycle shop owner. He's considered one of the country's elite bike builders, someone who creates machines for the likes of Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour de France. He fashions the lightest of bike frames from carbon fiber. His shop is outside Santa Cruz, a community known for its laid-back style.

His only link to the Third World is a long-ago trip to Africa. Yet somehow, more by accident than design, Calfee and his bamboo bikes might provide a means for rudimentary transport in the emerging world.

In a sense, Calfee is part of a bamboo craze sweeping the United States. Bamboo is suddenly chic, now that it's being made into everything from baby-soft T-shirts to baseball bats. Gone are the days when it was the stuff of cheap curtains and tacky lawn furniture. Bamboo has arrived.

"The uses are almost endless," said Dan Keesey, president of EcoDesignz, a Gardena, Calif.-based company that sells everything from bamboo clothing to furniture. "You can eat off it, wear it and sit on it." In Calfee's case, you also can ride it.

He still has that first bike he made a decade ago. He uses it to run errands, but doesn't bring it to the shop much because a customer might get the wrong idea. The bike has a big split in the wood - which he's repaired - and its mustache handlebars aren't exactly state-of-the-art. "A little rough" is how Calfee describes it - an experiment that worked well enough to tool around town. But the novelty was infectious.

"I built a few more for friends," he said. "I was just playing around with it, not taking it seriously. But people started asking about them, so I decided to start offering them to the public."

Among the believers was Ken Runyan of Emmett, Idaho, who owns a hardware and bike shop and saw Calfee's bamboo creation at a Las Vegas trade show. He ordered one to sell (frames go for $2,700) but ended up keeping it. He found he liked it better than his other bikes.

"It's a great bike," said Runyan, 63, who rode it in Hawaii's Ironman triathlon last year. "People look at it and ask if it's really made of bamboo."

And, of course, there are the obligatory jokes: Keep it out of the rain so it doesn't sprout; use it for firewood if you get lost; you'll never lack for a toothpick. But Runyan said he also noticed his times were faster on long rides. And when he cracked the top tube of his frame, all he needed was Super Glue to patch it up.

"It's still kind of a gimmick bike," he said. "But I wouldn't have any qualms about selling it to anybody."

Word spread that the bamboo bike was for real. Calfee started thinking about his unusual form of transportation. The plant itself - a member of the grass family - was common throughout Asia and Africa. And bicycles, he knew, meant transportation, which often translates to jobs in the Third World. Calfee put a small item on his Web site, calfeedesign.com, saying that a bamboo bike could have some value in developing nations, if someone took up the cause. What he hoped for was a grant writer or sugar daddy to get the project going. The blurb linked to a Calfee-written paper outlining the virtues of bamboo bikes, including the availability of materials, the lack of need for electric tools and increased mobility and access to jobs and markets. Included was a picture of a bamboo bike frame whose pieces are lashed together with hemp fiber.

Calfee figured that sooner or later, someone with cash or connections would see the site. Five or six people saw the Web site item and did call, but nothing happened. Then Calfee received an e-mail from David Ho, a hard-core cyclist from New York who was thinking about buying one of Calfee's custom carbon fiber bikes. While he was on Calfee's Web site, Ho clicked on the bamboo bike link.

It happened that Ho worked for the Earth Institute of Columbia University, a nonprofit organization that focuses on sustainable development and the world's poor. The two men discussed both carbon fiber bikes and bamboo bikes. Ho sent Calfee a copy of "The End of Poverty," written by the institute's director, Jeffrey Sachs, who is often cited as one of the major thinkers on Third World economies.

Calfee liked the ideas in the book. Ho started drumming up support within the institute for the project. The institute eventually financed the late June trip to Ghana for about $25,000. Calfee, Ho and one other representative from the institute planned to be there for 10 days. Ho said they want to find people interested in making the bike frames, as well as sources for epoxy, resin and sisal - a fiber used for making rope, sacking and insulation. The bottom line, Calfee said, is to be able to make a frame without using power tools. Said Ho: "The other part of our visit is to look in rural areas for what they are using for transportation and how to improve it."

In particular, Ho said, he wants to focus on the special needs of women, because they often tend to crops, do the chores, control the money and need transportation. Calfee says he's no Pollyanna and realizes there will be pitfalls. But he also thinks success in Ghana could mean success in other places. And they've got to start somewhere.