Bontrager Bat Cage now made from recycled fishing nets
The Bontrager Bat Cage is now environmentally friendly.
For the last 22 years, Trek has manufactured hundreds of thousands of Bontrager Bat Cages in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, 30 miles from the company’s headquarters in Waterloo. This water bottle cage is simple, durable, and light, weighing less than 50 grams. Now it’s environmentally friendly, too.
Trek recently announced a re-release of its longest-standing unchanged product. The injection-molded Bontrager Bat Cage, that was first introduced in 1997, is now being made from discarded and end-of-life fishing nets that could otherwise pollute the world’s oceans, which are already under assault.
Instead of polluting the ocean, these old nets will now hold your water bottles.
Indeed, there are over 86 million metric tons of plastic in our oceans right now, and more than 8 million metric tons are added every year. Fishing nets make up an estimated 10% of all plastic in the ocean. What’s even worse is that they are drastically more harmful to the ocean environment than all other forms of plastic pollution.
This change for good was made possible through Trek’s partnership with Bureo and membership in NextWave, a cross-industry consortium of companies working to reduce the staggering amount of plastics plaguing our environment. Trek is a founding member of the consortium, which also includes Dell, General Motors, IKEA, HP, Interface, Humanscale, Herman Miller, and Bureo.
These pellets were once fishing nets, and will some day be Bontrager Bat Cages.
Through Trek’s partnership with NextWave, the company was introduced to Bureo, a group dedicated to giving new life to discarded fishing nets. Bureo collects end-of-life fishing nets and recycles them into tiny pellets that can be used for injection-molded plastic products like Bat Cage, sunglasses, skateboards, and more. In the case of the Bat Cage, recycled raw material is sourced from ocean fishing nets collected in Chile
“The Bontrager Bat Cage may be a small product, but it’s the little hinge that swings a big door,” said Justin Henkel, Trek’s Director of Product for Saddles and Essentials. “This year alone, it will put 44,000 square feet (or 3850 pounds) of discarded fishing nets to good use. That’s making a real difference.”
Bontrager Bat Cage weight is a svelte 48 grams.
The new recycled plastic Bontrager Bat Cage costs $15 and is available on trekbikes.com and through Trek’s network of retail partners.
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