Decathlon has published what it calls a “Mobility Transition Pathway Pledge,” having to do with bicycles, e-bikes and Europe’s ambition to rid itself of internal-combustion engines.
The pledge derives from the European Commission’s (EC’s) “Mobility Transition Pathway,” the “European Declaration on Cycling” and the EU’s “Critical Raw Materials Act.”
The idea is to get more people to trade motorized transport for bicycles and to produce the bicycles with fewer virgin raw materials.
Among Decathlon’s plans is to establish a “dual reparability index for electrically-assisted bicycles (mechanical and electrical components)” and to have all of the company’s bikes evaluated on the index’s criteria.
In fact, Decathlon appears to favor what in the US is called the “right to repair” – some version of which has been around since the heyday of Henry Ford. By Decathlon’s definition reparability boils down to manuals, spare parts, ease of disassembly and a repair cost that’s at least 30 percent less than the bike’s retail price. Decathlon is promising to have all of its bikes assessed for reparability by 2026.
By that same deadline it hopes to register five million bikes in a “functioning bike-marking database” and to develop, with the French and Belgian governments, an “interoperable bike marking system.” Ideally this marking system would later spread throughout the EU.
By 2030 the company hopes to have increased the “‘circular’ turnover of its cycling division” to 25 percent. In other words, a quarter of the division’s revenues should by then derive from rentals, leases, sharing services or secondhand sales. To this end it plans to buy back and refurbish 500,000 bikes by 2026 and one million by 2030. Rentals alone should account for 10 percent of the division’s business by 2026 and 20 percent by 2030.
Decathlon’s contribution to the EU’s program for raw materials is centered on aluminum and the mineral most of it is refined out of, bauxite – 80 percent of which, the company says, is imported to the EU. The domestic supple, it continues, is insufficient to “de-risk virgin material.” Decathlon wishes to get more aluminum with less bauxite, and therefore seeks to recycle the aluminum. It will be studying recycled content in aluminum for bikes and publishing its results in 2025. It will also be partaking in the “JRC preparatory study for ecodesign criteria” on aluminum, in line with the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.
Meanwhile, e-bike factories are having trouble procuring batteries against heavy demand from car factories. According to Decathlon, worldwide e-bike demand amounts to 0.03 percent of a single automotive giga-factoryʼs production capacity (about 500 GwH). To draw some attention to e-bike factories Decathlon seeks to build a coalition with the cycling industry and the EC.
The entirety of Decathlon’s nine-part pledge is posted online.
