The Giant Pre rCarbon is a lightweight £599/$500 balance bike manufactured using a novel form of recycled carbon fibre.
Carbon fibre recycling is nothing new – as far back as 2011, big brands, including Trek, began introducing carbon fibre recycling programmes, with the noble aim of bringing new life to this notoriously difficult-to-recycle material.
The difference here is that Giant has successfully built a bike – albeit a tot-sized one – with few to no compromises versus manufacturing using virgin carbon fibre.
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First: a primer on what carbon fibre is, and why it’s so difficult to recycle.
Carbon fibre is a composite material made by embedding ultra-strong carbon strands within a resin.
This is strong and light, but makes it notoriously difficult to recycle – unlike an aluminium or steel frame, it can’t simply be melted down.
The most common approach to dealing with scrap carbon fibre is to shred or pyrolyse it.
Pyrolysis involves heating the material in the absence of oxygen, burning away the resin and leaving behind the carbon fibres.
While this process can recover the fibres, they’re typically shorter and weaker than virgin carbon, making them less suitable for high-performance applications such as bike frames.
Shredding is the other common option.
As the name suggests, this turns the material into chopped fibre that’s usually downcycled into lower-grade applications – think tyre levers, bottle cages or novel uses, such as filler in tubeless sealant.
Giant says its new process takes long-strand recycled carbon fibres and moulds them using “a proprietary resin formula and 3D fusion compound with high-pressure, low-void molding”. Giant doesn’t outline where it sources the fibres used in the bike.
The resulting bike is claimed to be as strong and light as those made using traditional manufacturing techniques, with a 50% reduction in carbon emissions to boot.
Giant describes the bike as a “major milestone in… efforts to produce more eco-friendly bikes, components and gear using recycled materials and sustainable manufacturing processes”, and could be a sign of how the brand will build bikes in the future.
While I don’t expect to see a top-flight TCR of the future manufactured using recycled carbon, should the tech be proven viable, why couldn’t the mid-tier bikes of the future adopt it?
Elsewhere, the rubber and plastics used on the bike are also manufactured using recycled materials. This includes the tyres, which are made using Seawatex – a nylon sourced from marine plastic waste.
All in, the bike weighs 2.5kg – significantly less than a typical balance bike.
Such highfalutin tech comes at a price – £599/$500 is, clearly, a lot of money to spend on a balance bike, and will only be of interest to truly committed cycling parents, who must have a matching fleet of carbon superbikes in the garage.
Still, to Giant’s credit, that’s half the price of the Specialized Hotwalk when it was launched.
Price aside, the bike is a cool showcase for green tech that will, hopefully, find its way onto full-size bikes of the future.
