RETHINK · Juni 09, 2021
MODMO and sustainability
Not only do we make a product that is contributing to the global trend towards green transport - the bike that could replace your car - we are also working towards being a zero-emission company.
Most products on the market these days, from your favourite pair of sneakers to your mobile phone, all require globe-traversing, carbon-emitting supply chains to be assembled and then sent to you. Yes, even your keep-cup will probably have a carbon footprint, however big or small.
The issue is that in order to pull together a cohesive product you have to first source the parts and quite often those parts are produced in different countries.
Modmo wanted to do something different. We are determined to reach the point where everything we do is entirely zero-emission, from the type of product we produce to how we produce and deliver it.
So instead of building a global supply chain, we are focussing on Vietnam, slowly localising production to reduce the environmental impact of having hundreds of trucks on the road and ships on the ocean moving components from all over the world to our assembly factory.
The First Bicycle
When our founder Jack was planning to create MODMO, he travelled the world via China and Taiwan looking for the perfect manufacturing partners. In order to bring his vision for the first car-replacing ebike to life, he needed automotive-grade manufacturing, but for a bicycle.
By luck, he came to Vietnam and found a state of the art motorbike factory close to MODMO's headquarters in HCMC.
Back then - two years ago now - the factory had very little experience in making bicycles. But Jack wanted to use an automotive factory because he knew that only then could he meet the quality standards he expected to offer - things like lifetime durability, build quality, incredible attention to detail. The factory was interested in diversifying, so they set out to grow together in manufacturing the Saigon.
Since then MODMO's relationship with the factory has developed into a close business partnership where we are able to develop manufacturing and quality control together, and because we believe in the same vision - a clean, healthy planet - our partnership has flourished.
Working Towards Sustainability
One of the things we want to achieve as a company is a zero-emission supply chain. This is part of the reason why Jack chose a factory so close to MODMO's headquarters.
"Rather than purchasing components from all around the world and shipping them to Vietnam, we set the target to create every component within a 40 kilometer radius of our headquarters, massively reducing transport pollution, byproduct waste, inefficiencies, etc."
At this point, we are very much in the process of making our supply chain zero-emission. We produce the bulk of our components under one roof, from frames to forks and, more recently, cranksets, but there is still a way to go, so we have set goals and are ticking them off one by one.
Check out this map to see our current supply chain. We are currently focussing on moving production into Vietnam.
There are a number of things that MODMO and our partner factory do to make our manufacturing as sustainable as possible.
We work together to reduce the amount of packaging we use where necessary and we have completely removed single use plastics and single use cardboards from our packaging process. We now use reusable currents to move products between their factory and our final assembly factory, as well as storage.
Then comes our waste production - we try to keep this to a minimum, but anything we do produce gets recycled. As we process bikes from raw material to finished products, there are a lot of off cuts and extra material that are cut away from the final piece. Rather than throwing this away, we compile it into small blocks and melt it again to recycle into material for new bikes.
Then there is the factory itself which has recently retrofitted their entire rooftop - all 400,000 square meters - with solar panels, converting it to a sustainable energy source to produce hundreds of thousands of products every day, including our bikes.
We are actively building more products to add to our suite of zero-emission ebikes and we can't wait for you to see what we're working on. We will keep you updated in articles and our regular videos.
Check out other ways in which MODMO is rethinking aspects of life, bicycles and our own company - for example, our MODMO-patented light system.
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