I took a look at a Brooks Saddle the other day at a friend’s house. He’s a serious cycle commuter, not just a recreational punter, so I was intrigued when I saw the Brooks. I didn’t understand the mystique, but a quick look at how they’re made was enough to make me understand. Where most saddles consist of a hard shell with rails that allow it be moved back and forth, the Brooks design uses the rails, but the leather saddle is suspended without the hard inner shell. So you lose the pressure points and gain the malleability of leather.
Pain in [ahem] seat has always been a factor on the bike, coupled with some alarming numbness, so perhaps this was a solution. Looking to see if leather-free alternatives are possible, I found a thread over at the Veloshop in Portland. Zealots (read: people you disagree with) are always irritating.
When I see comments professing a love for synthetic fabrics and materials over animal or natural products, I wonder why I ever thought that veganism and environmentalism overlapped. Plastic saddles, spandex clothes, bike components made in metalworks in countries with lax environmental standards, then shipped from China or Europe, in this age of man-made climate change, all of it preferable to woolens and leather — it just boggles the mind.
I don’t think the modern industrial slaughterhouse is any great thing either, but I think an awareness of where and how our shiny toys are made is just as important as understanding how our food is made.
The only alternative saddle mentioned — a Fizik Arione ti — is Italian and is made of a variety of materials — carbon fiber shell, foam, kevlar, titanium — that likely come with a resource footprint that outweighs leather. Add in the biodegradability and lifecycle of each and it gets really confusing. A worn-out plastic saddle will be thrown away, while a leather one might outlast the rider. After all, plastic is forever, or damn near.
Consider the North Pacific Gyre: an accumulation of plastic debris the size of Texas, estimated to contain 3,000,000 tons of discarded plastic junk. In 2001, researchers found that “there [were] six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton.”
Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic-that is, non-water-soluble-toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.
The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5 x 1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish?
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And the scale of the phenomenon is astounding. I now believe plastic debris to be the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet’s surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris.
Plastics. The future that may rob us of ours . . . ?
And it’s not like carbon fiber is some kind of natural component either. Very energy-intensive to make, chemically-based. Say what you like about tanneries, I don’t think they compare.
My ethical guideline has been to reduce my footprint where possible, to use less, to re-use or do without where possible. I can’t square that with man-made fabrics and exotic metals and global shipping networks.
Now playing: Grind from the album “Gold Afternoon Fix” by The Church