Brompton Bicycle

Matthew Plata

In July 2023, we at Brompton Bicycle - a British manufacturer of folding bicycles, proudly received our B Corp certification, a huge milestone for us. B Corp status is centred on committing to using our business as a force for good - to become certified, we completed a B Impact Assessment, answering 300 questions across five impact topics. While time-consuming, this process helped us to understand the areas of sustainability we can focus on to improve our credentials further and identify the parts of manufacturing where changes will have the greatest impact.

In our case, one of those areas is waste management, which is within the assessment impact topic ‘Environment’. Reducing all types of waste is the common backbone of both LEAN and sustainability - it’s a win-win and is the first approach in our arsenal. Last year we reduced the volume of waste per bike from 8.6kg (2 years prior) to 1.8kg, a massive 79 percent reduction.

One of the initiatives to enable this shift was a re-think of our bike frame washing process that sits between our final machining operations and our paint plant. Our engineering team implemented a system to closed-loop recycle trade effluent from washing, with the remaining contaminants sent to an industrial hazardous waste recycling facility (with a 90 percent recycling rate). These changes resulted in a reduction in water use and hazardous waste per bike by 81 percent. As a knock-on effect, with cleaner frames came improved yield from our in-house powder coating process, which in turn freed up the capacity to trial and implement exciting special edition products such as CHPT3 and Barbour.

The bike washing process initiative is a great example of how Brompton has benefitted from owning a huge part of our manufacturing value chain, including hand-brazing our bike frames, building our own wheels, and assembling the finished product. This vertical integration allows all our staff to identify opportunities for change easily and make a difference in our manufacturing processes.

"By embedding ‘Sustainability Champions’ in our production teams, we have seen some great ideas resulting in fantastic improvements."

By embedding ‘Sustainability Champions’ in our production teams, we have seen some great ideas resulting in fantastic improvements. For example, the warehouse team handled hundreds of parts daily and noted that our gear shifters were delivered in single-use plastic bags. Knowing that there must be a better way, they brought a concept to our Sustainability team, who worked with our production buyers to introduce stackable, reusable packaging trays. A simple solution that eliminated the need for single-use plastics while still protecting parts from damage in transit. We now use these trays for all our gear shifters, of which there were over 157,000 last year alone.

At Brompton, we consider the sustainability journey alongside the ambitions of the business to grow efficiently and innovate rather than as an opposing force, and we already see the results from these waste reduction examples. But we’re not done yet - even in waste reduction, we are looking into digitising build cards to save on paper and printing waste, while opening up possibilities for video walkthroughs and training.

While this is just Brompton’s journey, I hope it inspires you to see what ideas you and your staff have to offer, as well as the knock-on benefits they can have. It’s likely there are some efficiency initiatives your business has implemented in the last six months that improved one or more sustainability metrics (perhaps one you don’t even measure yet).

For more information about our sustainable manufacturing journey, read the latest sustainability report on our website.