The three destinations of your bike donation:
We get asked this a fair bit!
Option 1: A lot of bikes are given directly to a refugee or asylum seeker, after our mechanics give them some TLC, and you should receive an email with some information on who it was donated to.
Option 2: For the fancier bikes – those that have a decent resale value – they will be added to our bike shop. The proceeds of the sale can fund multiple asylum seekers and refugees with a bike.
Option 3: Reusing some parts of your bike to build another bike and scrapping the unusable parts.
Let’s explain this third option a bit more. Sometimes your donated bike has some amazing parts and some other less amazing parts. The latter will be scrapped and all the good bits will be taken and, with the creative skill of our mechanics, will be put to good use to create another beautiful bike. So the final unique bike is made up of different parts from multiple donated bikes.
Take at a look at this build of Ant’s, our Senior mechanic in Deptford:
Chris, a volunteer from Birmingham, donated this old vintage frame he had in his possession. The tubes are high-spec Italian steel, crafted by Columbus, a company with a decades long history, who also used to make tubes for the aeronautics industry, iconic Italian furniture, Moto GP, race cars and more. The material and frames are widely sought after, light, strong and yet forgiving. They’ve been used by The Greatest Of All Time in a few different sports.
As incredible as the frame was, it was an incomplete bike. The team slowly accumulated the spare parts they needed. Recently, another donated bike had a terminally-damaged frame. This was a stroke of luck as many of its good parts could be reused on Chris’ vintage frame, hurrah!
The result…
And she’s ready to roll!
So we have many people to thank for this gorgeous bike. Even if some bikes are individually destined for scrap, our mechanics can work wonders – a bit like surgery with donor organs!
Sadly we can’t keep track of every single spare part so, if your bike was used this way, you might not receive a notification as if the bike was directly sold or donated. But you can rest assured we’ll always do our best to recycle and reuse every bit we can.
Donate an old bike today! Let’s get refugees moving forward.
