What does Green mean?

Green Machine Cycles

Several years back I started wondering why bike shops generally don't make substantial efforts to choose sustainable products and business practices. Components, apparel, and supplies sold at a typical shop use excessive packaging and virgin materials. Cleaners and lubricants marketed to cyclists are often no less toxic to users or the environment than those for the automotive industry. Few shops creatively reduce these excesses from their waste stream. 

Ideally, the most energy-efficient form of transportation should inspire a commensurate commitment to greenness. To that end we intend to be the greenest, most sustainable bike shop in the city. 

Green Machine Cycles's commitment to providing the most sustainable goods and services is an intentional lifestyle and business choice driven by observations of indifference to waste and toxicity over the course of a 20-year career in the bike industry. At every opportunity we will endeavor to make business decisions rooted in the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of each of our products and practices. Though it is a daunting task, likely far beyond the capacity and scope of a neighborhood bike shop, we truly enjoy the challenge of using LCA to drive our business choices, and we like starting dialogues with our customers. We welcome your thoughts.



Please contact us or navigate to the forums below, or both.

Green Machine Cycles

You may know that modernist architect Le Corbusier called the house a "machine for living." A bicycle might well be considered a machine for loving. Like any good lover, a bicycle will gradually teach you things about itself and about yourself. A bike is not mute; if you listen carefully it will profess its identity clearly. It wants its independence and wants to be fierce and stalwart and capable, but it needs to be coddled and pampered as well. The more respect you have for your bike, the better your relationship will be.


When I was growing up (still in process) I spent an inordinate amount of time taking things apart and unsuccessfully reassembling them. Clocks, radios, chairs, whatever. I wanted to know what was inside, and perhaps more importantly, why the workings were often concealed. Bicycles don't conceal much. There everything is, no superfluous material, no wasted space, the necessary and the sufficient.


At around the age of 15 a neighbor caught me disassembling a hub, the bearings and cones all over the floor. He recited that old saw, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," so I unconsciously set out to prove him wrong. The only way to know if it's broke is to know how it works when it ain't broke.  Not coincidentally, it turns out that the only way to learn about the world is to watch it and poke it and take it apart, to test this or that, to rebuild it, and to ask 'how' or 'why' or 'why not.'  


With a little coaxing and coaching we learn that we can do all our errands by bike, and we can travel to far-away lands. We can get to work on time every day by bike, and we can lose ourselves in a day-long ride, not knowing where the hours went. It's all possible. With Green Machine's help and your desire our worlds get a little better every day.


You're an expert at your life. We're experts at bikes. Let's make it happen.

Green Machine Cycles

Here's where we wax poetic, where we go round and round, elliptical even. We would be happy to post some of your own bike-centric musings here.


A wheel doesn't know a beginning or an end. It is a complete, interminable cycle, starting and ending impartially, anywhere on its circumference. We can choose to impose distinct points on the wheel's circumference, define a radius or arc, but the truth remains that a wheel wants to be a wheel, an uninterrupted cycle.


When we attend to the design and engineering of the machine, and similarly attend to the globally interconnected health of its components, we allow the good cycle of life to continue uninterrupted as well. 


The cycle is our solace and forgiveness and our irrefutable truth: the Earth rotates, the sun rises and sets, the seasons change, we're born and grow and die and our atoms reorganize and try again in another assembly, the galaxy rotates, the universe expands and maybe contracts and maybe does it again. If you screw something up, take heart that you can do it a better way next time around. If you maintain the small cycles in your life the bigger ones fall into place and gather steam from the small. Practice, maintain, feel momentum, help it along, relax.


Bicycles are the same way. Start small. Ensure you have attended to the little details, and the rest of the machine will fall into place. Cut corners (absent in circles and cycles, of course) and natural forces pull you back. 
It isn't easy being green.