Dinâmica - The Circular Bicycle Factory

We have a serious global mobility crisis, the individual transportation systems has failed in big cities. The car doesn’t fit in the public space and uses a huge amount of resources and pollutes the air, water and soil with fumes and gases from ICE's. Many are trying to make the cars better, but we have an inherent urban space problem that will not be solved sticking to this solution.

When we analyzed all the individual transport technologies we figure out that the vehicle of the future has arrived a long time ago: the bicycle! It’s uses very little resources to be built, is energy effective, occupies one of the smallest spaces among all other vehicles, burns fat and keep you fit and healthy!

Despite the benefits of the bicycle, the bicycle industry is in the wrong way when it comes to circular economy. We created Dinâmica to change that!

100 million bicycles are produced each year in the world. With an average weight of 12.5kg, we are talking about 1,250,000 metric tons of materials, considering all the minerals, oil, gases, energy, packaging, lubricants, aftermarket parts, logistics and everything that is involved in the market, we have a considerable impact of this industry in the environment.

The bicycle carries a “green flag” that makes people look at it without considering all the aspects of it’s production, durability and disposal. The bicycle industry is one of the least considerable when it comes with the right use of materials, recyclability, processes and durability of their products, they are used to build bicycles with all sorts of metals alloys welded together, toxic alloying elements, non-recyclable, high scrap disposal and high energy consumption carbon fiber frames, forks and parts, supermarket bicycles that are built to last a couple of months, petrol lubricants and products that are washed away in natural waters when cycling outdoor.

Global brands move their production to lower regulated Asian countries to avoid environmental compensation and litigation costs. These manufactures comes to the point of disposing carbon fiber scraps in rivers because of the high cost of incineration.

Our solutions are meant to affect the lives of the global community as it lightens the burden of the bicycle industry on the environment. 

We are not focused on affect an specific group of people, but we create jobs, opportunities and increase the demand for responsible materials and technologies in over 40 suppliers in Brasil. The benefit to the customers is that they have a better product to buy that lasts much longer and is environmentally effective. In the long term we look forward to make the entire supply chain more responsible.

Our goal is to be the first fully circular bicycle factory, using only healthy, safe and Cradle to Cradle materials, the whole factory and processes are modeled like the organism of a three:

• producing only with the energy it can get from the sun
  • We want to work fully on photovoltaic and disconnect the factory from the power lines, this will pressure the factory to use only the exact amount of energy on each step of the processes.
  • On a second phase of growth, we want to integrate solar panels in agroforest facilities to collect energy and make proper use of the soil for food production, microclime and habitat's for Atlantic Forest species. 
• collecting water from the rain and moisture
  • Specially designed cisterns and water collecting refrigeration systems that will alow us to disconnect the factory from the public water and wastewater system.
• recycling it’s own water using bio-filters that creates micro-climate on its surroundings
  • Fully biologic wastewater systems to recycle every drop of water
• sequestering carbon using high temperature plasma reform to extract biogas and energy from non-recyclable technical and biological nutrients
  • This technology is under development in Germany and we want to integrate ir in our process to receive problematic technical nutrients and power our plant from it's energy.
• recycling and replicating bicycles infinitely
  • Our material and manufacture technology uses only compatible and monomaterial parts that can be recycled infinitely without any loss in quality or changes in chemical composition. We want to trust the infinite solar income to recycle those materials and make bicycles from bicycles and other scrap materials.

We are meant to be the proof of concept that a circular business can be environmentally positive and profitable in Brazil!

As our inovative approach comes from the use of technology, we will merge this question with the next:

We have a new monomaterial approach that makes the bicycle infinitely recyclable without any loss in quality, using a specially designed steel microalloyed to manganese (1,6%)  that improves yield strength by 80% and allow us to build a bicycle that is lighter and lasts at least 20 years in service. The normal method of building steel bicycles uses a mix of materials that includes chrome based alloys, brazing filler rods that contaminates the steel with stranger elements like cooper, lead, tin, silver and phosporous, making it too costly to be upcycled. The chrome itself is a heavy metal that causes cancer, leukemia and birth defects, so from the extraction to the disposal it creates a path of disease and wasted technical nutrients. We do not use any part that is impossible to recycle, the tires was the most challenging part, but we made a partnership with a local recycling facility that turns ir into powder to make construction materials.

Our 2-step painting process involves KTL e-coat and electrostatic painting that are extremely low in VOC's, heavy metals free and ROHS compliant. We are waiting financial sustainability and growth to build the painting equipment in-house and power it with solar energy instead of gas.

We developed a new lubricant system with a local supplier that have a 5 generation grease technology that has only food grade ingredients and exceed the performance of current top of the line bicycle lubricants by 3x. Biodegrades in 14 days when tested by ISO 17025:2005.

The packaging is monomaterial and 100% plastic free, it uses cardboard, non-reinforced gummed paper tape, kraft paper and original celulose-based cellophane for invoice attachment. All the materials are compatible with the paper recycling facilities.

It's working

• 50 people now
• 300 in an year
• 5000 in five years

Grow the business for the volume to help with the environmental solutions

Many

Throgh different swolutions

We are a for-profit organization

3 full-time staffs

Vinicius Villas Boas de Alencar - Engineer and owner

Vitor Lopes - Bicycle Mechanic

Felipe Tavares Paiva - Maketing and Sales

1 part-time employee

Antonio Luis Oliveira - Welding Specialist

Vinicius Villas Boas de Alencar

32 years old – Brazilian – Married

Academic/ Educational background

• International Certification on Bicycle Mechanics (Escola Park Tool – São Paulo/Brazil)

• Mechanical engineer w/ Emphasis in Robotics (Fundação Santo André – São Paulo/Brazil)

• 4.5 years of Electrical/Electronics Engineering course (not finished) (FEI – São Paulo/Brazil)

• Chemistry lab technician (ETEC Julio de Mesquita – São Paulo/Brazil)

Job Experience

• 4 years in Bicycle Engineering and Testing. Supplied bicycle frames and forks to third part and developed and launched 3 successful products in the market that are already in line with the Circular Economy philosophy.

• 4 years in Commercial Mahogany Regenerative Agroforestry Responsible Engineer in an African Mahogany production site using the methods of Regenerative Agroforestry. Designed and automated the greenhousing facilities for seedling production, soil quality control, decontamination, soil production, chemical safety, worm farming, etc.

• 8 years as Chassis/Suspension Design Engineer at General Motors do Brasil Designed parts and systems for global cars and platforms like GM New Colorado (US), New S10 and Trail Blazer (Brazil/Latin America/Tailand/Australia).

• 1 year as Chemistry Technician at IPT – Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas do Estado de São Paulo (USP) Lab technician of PhD students in biopolymers made from biologic carbon sources as sugar cane, soy oil, vinegar, ethanol (1st and 2nd generation) via fermentation processes. Carried out the labor on experiments, extractions and analysis.

Felipe Tavares Paiva – Marketing and sales

Vitor Lopes - Bicycle Mechanic

Antônio Luis Oliveira - Welding Specialist

Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas - São Paulo/Brazil

Metallurgy Department

Seeking partnership in steel formulation, recyclability and tubing. 

We developed a mass customization system to sell on-line and deliver tailor made that fit's perfectly to the clients body, anywhere in Brazil. The clients have several customization options:

• 18 colors to chose for the frame and fork
• hundreds of possible combinations of colors of saddle and handlebar tapes
• multiple part group options for the drivetrain
• upgrade packages for specific groups of parts like brakes and cockpits

In the end, the client receives a perfect bicycle with all the parts that he or she would have to buy in the aftermarket, avoiding do accumulate unused parts at home or selling below the market value.

 The goal of Dinâmica is to be the first fully circular bicycle factory, using only healthy, safe and Cradle to Cradle materials, the whole factory and processes are modeled like the organism of a tree, producing only with the energy it can get from the sun*, collecting and recycling it’s own water using bio-filters that creates micro-climate on its surroundings and fertilizers*, recycling and replicating bicycles infinitely.

*to be implemented

We already have profitable products that meets the market needs and have the best customers evaluations of the country, but we need to sell more to make the business sustainable.

In the first 3 years, we worked with a different business model, supplying as manufacturers to other brands, this choice was made because of a number o different supplier problems and other factors that broke the business in two attempts. Now we learned from our mistakes and knows the market very deeply. After this renovation we created a new business model that is succeeding but we need to sell higher volumes. Today we are selling an average of 12 bicycles/month, we need to sell 18 to start sustainability, we are very close! The full capacity is 48/month with our current infrastructure and if we sell at full capacity we would have U$D11,300.00 net profit/month.

We started a private investment fund a year ago that pays 1,5%/month and avoids the very high Brazilian bank taxes that goes up to 14%/month, it's used to fund our working capital that has to be maintained around U$D25,000.00 and this way the banks cannot break our capital.

We are expanding our portfolio of 3 to 7 bicycle models by the end of 2020, this strategy will make our profits more secure due to the more diverse sales public target. 

A great oportunity