The world is littered with crap left over from convenience and penny pinching – you must have seen the plastic mineral water bottles discarded at trail heads, the plastic bags snagged on barbwire fences. Been down the beach recently, amazed at the millions of tiny plastic pellets, washed up coke bottles and dead seagulls? Seen the pictures of child labour in India and China...?

... this is what we are doing about it...

1% For The Planet: The earth pays whenever there is consumerism and trade – through 1% for the planet we are paying back for what we have taken. We have signed up to give away 1% of our turnover to grass roots projects in the UK.

Sounds pretty generous? You bet it is, it’s a freakin' shed load of money, that I really don’t think I can afford… but...

...when the seas and full of stinking crap, the roads too dangerous to ride on, and the wilderness is no longer wild... what the hell will we do at the weekends?

We give about 12% of our money to the tax man (who spends some of it on killing innocent people in the pursuit of war/oil, not forgetting under funded hospitals etc), so 1% to help save us from ourselves starts to feel fair.

Through this I am also showing other cycle retailers that you can make money and have a social/environmental conscience. Actually thats not really true...  I am sticking two fingers up at them and shouting “What the **** are you doing then?” If our little business can carry this commitment then so can everyone else, especially the big players – unless of course they simply don’t give a shit? Perhaps they should read this book... Let My People Go Surfing

 

We have phased out selfish packaging: Some of our padded envelopes will be made from banana leftovers (really they are) and Jute, made in a village in India (where the people are treated fairly and paid fairly), and are also totally compostable. All the other padded bags (where a stouter bag is required) are Jiffy recycled bags.

Poly bags are out, and you will see some nice old skool brown paper. And our bubble wrap is scrounged from a nearby chinaware shop and reused by us. This can all then be reused by you.

We cycle or walk your package to the post office, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun, and sometimes we stop at the pub on the way back - got to support your local ale house.

 

Products that work: All the stuff we sell is good quality, damned great quality in fact. What the hell is the point of us selling you something that wont last.

Consider the process: dig away a mountain to get metal from the ground (maybe some guys lose their lives down the mines), drive it to a factory, process it, ship it to another country where its turned in to a flimsy chainring, wrap it in plastic, ship it to the USA, then on to Europe, then stick it in a lorry to somewhere in England, then to us, and then to you. That is one hell of a journey with bloody great container ships that are fuelled by oil, therefore requiring more oil tankers to carelessly chug past my favourite surf spots. Then there are the lorries, diesel engines chugging away, cutting up cyclists and making our cities taste like crap. Once it gets to you, you fit it, and then within a few hundred miles the teeth are hooked, or maybe it has bent, it then goes in the bin, or maybe you add it to your chainring wind chime?

So your crappy chainring goes through all of this… why? So a few people make a couple of pence profit per ring. I would rather just give them their profit out of my own pocket on the condition that they clear off and quit their pernicious trade.

We have got to take responsibility for the intangible environmental footprint left by what we consume as consumers and of what we produce as businesses. Would it not be better that the chainring is designed well and uses quality materials that are designed to last. You like your components to last, the environment also likes them to last.

A Surly steel chainring will outlast a dozen cheap nasty alloy ones, and therefore has a much lower environmental impact. … and that is why we don’t sell crappy products.

 

Call me a hippy, greeno, liberal tree hugger etc… and then **** off in your 3 litre 4WD to the gym. This business is based on some solid non-negotiable principles: we won’t rip anyone off, we do the right thing, we have fun, and we will do our bit to minimise impact on the environments that give us so much joy (mountains, beaches, trails, forests, parks etc). It’s pretty damned simple really. The reality is that we cannot exist without some environmental impact, but our aim is to minimise this impact as much as possible.