These gardening and bike repair services come to you — without a car

< warm> receive to our hebdomadary newssheet where we high spot environmental trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world.

Hi, it's Emily. I started noticing lots of landscaping companies in my neighbourhood that don't use a car, van or pickup truck to carry their tools and equipment — instead, they use a bike or e-bike and trailer. I wondered why.

This week:

Think you need a van or a pickup truck to run a business that involves hauling lawnmowers and bags of mulch, bike parts or loads of laundry? Some businesses are finding it cheaper, easier and greener to go with a bike or e-bike and trailer. 

E-bikes and cargo e-bikes are already widely used for delivery of both food and parcels. This newsletter also previously featured a reader who used e-bikes with trailers for his jobs renovating and repairing cottages.

I recently interviewed other business owners who rely on e-bikes and cargo trailers — and a Canadian company making trailers for businesses like them across North America and Europe.

Emil Glassbourg is the owner of Fabulous Flora, a gardening and landscaping company in Toronto. He says he can get 12 bags of mulch and a lot of plants into his Wike landscaping trailer. When we met last week, the trailer was loaded with potting soil, multiple rakes and shovels, a telescopic tree pruner and an artificial tree covered in pink flowers.

When clients warn him that parking is tough in their neighbourhood, he responds, "No, it won't be difficult for me." Friends suggested he needed a pickup truck for his growing business, but he says he never considered that, anticipating it would be stuck in traffic much of the time, since he lives downtown.

Matteo Zammit is co-founder of a bike repair co-operative that uses e-cargo bikes and an e-bike with a trailer to bring their services to people's homes and workplaces in the Greater Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo areas. If he and his team got around by car, he said, "we'd be bored, stuck in traffic. And we'd pay more insurance, we'd pay more gas. The prices [would] go up."

He said the tools and parts for bikes are actually relatively small. He initially started with a regular bike and a messenger bag, but the e-bike has expanded his range and trailers allow parts to be restocked less often.

A bonus? The big trailer with its giant banner and flag are "great for advertising," said Zammit.

Glassbourg says he sometimes gets flagged down by potential clients at stop signs or while his trailer is parked outside clients' homes. 

Both Zammit and Glassbourg say this isn't just about the convenience, cost and visibility. 

"It's also just a beautiful example to show the city what you can do on a bicycle," said Zammit. Glassbourg said it aligns with his approach to gardening: "Not being wasteful, respecting the ecosystem and building the ecosystem." And it attracts clients who share that vision.

A trailer for every small business

Both the landscaper and bike-repair business use gear from Wike, a company based in Guelph, Ont. 

Madison Soegtrop, who runs Wike's day-to-day operations, said the company's late founder, Bob Bell, had a vision to make the outdoors accessible without a car, so he made trailers for carrying children, canoes and kayaks. 

But he also wanted to help young people. He came up with a "landscaping trailer" so teenagers could affordably start summer businesses. It sells for a little over $1,000 and includes straps for tools and a ramp that folds down to make it easier to roll devices such as lawnmowers into the trailer.

"It's been really rewarding seeing all the people that have actually started businesses with it," Soegtrop said. 

Glassbourg is among them.

Zammit built his custom trailer from a do-it-yourself kit from Wike. 

Zammit says Wike's trailers, which can be used with any bike you already have, are "much more accessible" compared to off-the-shelf cargo e-bikes, which typically cost $6,000 or more (although his co-op uses those too).

Soegtrop said the landscaping trailer is popular for groundskeeping at universities and city parks (Toronto Botanical Gardens and the City of Montreal own some). On the day we spoke, she said the company had shipped one every day in the previous week, across North America. 

A sister company sells Wike's trailers in Europe.

Wike also has a lidded version of the landscaping trailer for other kinds of businesses. It's been used for street vending and programming at festivals and markets, and several are even used by a laundry pickup and delivery service in New York City.

— Emily Chung

Last week, Jennifer Wilson wrote about a new fiction genre called thrutopia that aims to show how humans can survive and thrive in the future.

Clement Kent of Toronto wrote to suggest some reading: "One of the best thrutopia writers is Kim Stanley Robinson. His The Ministry for the Future is one of several he's written looking at what the world may look like with climate change and how ordinary people react to disasters and reorganize to deal with them."

Graham Murray of Belle River, Ont., responded to last week's Big Picture about a new EV in Jasper National Park: "Happy to read your article about the new electric transport buses on the glacier fields. I visited that attraction for the first time two  years ago, and it seemed completely wrong to have those dirty fossil fuel vehicles polluting that space every single day. Ugh."

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca (and send photos there too!)

No doubt you’re familiar with Greenpeace protests above the water — from kayakers in convoys to activists rappelling down bridges to block oil tanker traffic. The group now claims the world’s deepest protest ever, under the Arctic Ocean. 

To withstand the crushing pressures at more than 2,300 metres below the surface, they used a remotely operated vehicle named Holly to flash this sign near a hydrothermal vent field. That exact location, known as Loki’s Castle, is not only home to a lot of life that lives without light, but those 300 C vents also reveal some geologic history of the Earth. 

The sign is a call on nations to protect the deep, unexplored oceans from the threats of deep seabed mining. 

— Anand Ram

It may soon become easier to get your ripped tent or broken ski boots fixed in British Columbia.

A college in southeastern B.C. Is opening what it calls Canada's first outdoor gear repair and advanced manufacturing centre.

The initiative is a partnership between the College of the Rockies and the Kootenay Outdoor Recreation Enterprise (KORE), an industry group that represents about 100 local gear makers and designers.

The Rehub Circular Technology Centre, which has received $1 million in provincial funding, aims to create a local research and development hub for gear makers, while giving students the chance to learn how to design and repair outdoor equipment.

"We're fortunate to have a lot of skilled, what I call 'textile engineers,' that live in the Kootenays and we have this great love for the outdoors, great love for the outdoor gear," he said.

"But we needed to find a solution because we don't want all this outdoor gear ending up in the landfill."

Keeping outdoor equipment in circulation for longer through maintenance and repair is already one of KORE's focuses.

The organization's Rehub circular gear initiative deploys a mobile repair team that tours through the Kootenays over the summer to help people keep jackets, ski poles, backpacks and other gear out of the trash.

The college's Gold Creek Campus in Cranbrook will now give that work a permanent home.

Mosteller said the ultimate goal is for the facility to become a key node in Canada's outdoor recreation world by bringing together students, industry and the outdoor community.

"That really starts with creating a hub at the college, a place where we can put equipment in, where we can bring in the knowledge, our leaders and develop courses for workforce training, workforce development," he said.

"And also offer our core collective members, those craft outdoor gear makers, a place where they can do R&D and prototype and run a small-batch, light-manufacturing run of gear that they would like to see go to market."

According to data from the provincial government, outdoor recreation contributes $4.8 billion annually to B.C.'s economy.

The College of the Rockies described the initiative as a chance to deepen the school's role in developing the region's economy, while giving students a chance to develop hands-on skills.

“For decades, College of the Rockies has been a leader in adventure education and outdoor recreation, rooted in the landscapes and industries of our region," president and CEO Michael Crowe said in a statement.

"This partnership with KORE builds on that legacy by connecting our outdoor expertise with advanced manufacturing, applied research, and circular economy innovation."

Mosteller said the first step is getting the space set up with equipment and resources for KORE's maker community.

But he said they're looking to get the programming and educational side up and running as fast as possible.

If that work is successful, he said, it could create a pathway for students to build new careers in their own communities.

"A lot of the youth in these mountain towns, you know, they want to live there," he said.

"They just want to figure out how they can ... Build something, and doing what they love outside, and creating a future where they can buy a house and raise their family."

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, criticisms or story tips, please send them to whatonearth@cbc.ca.

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Editors: Emily Chung | Logo design: Sködt McNalty

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