Sustainability
The single best way to reduce the impact of a product is by increasing its lifetime. The longer a bike gets used, with one or more owners, the smaller the need for the production of a new one. Our firm focus on durability and having timeless products helps us work towards a less impactful footprint on the planet.
We keep bikes going
Our frames are designed around a small amount of unique hardware parts, most of these being used in our frames since the very start of RAAW. We keep a stock of all frame parts for current and even previous frame versions, guaranteeing the availability of spares for all frames ever produced. In rare cases, spare parts might be listed as sold out. But this means new stock is ordered and for emergency cases we always have a small amount still in stock.
Upgrade Your Bike
Our frames have seen refinements throughout the past years and many of these updates have also been designed to retrofit the previous versions of our frames. Updates to the frame’s hardware, new protection pieces and the introduction of our own through axle are all available for existing owners. This allows frames to be updated, have a longer life and avoids obsolescence. You can find all available upgrades on this page.
We’ve Got Your Back
The importance of our focus on durability is emphasized by our extended five-year warranty that also extends to second owners. Next to our warranty program, we also offer five-year crash replacement coverage. When things don’t go your way and you happen to damage your frame, we offer a replacement of just what is needed to get you back on the trails. In most cases there’s no need for replacing the whole frame. So, replacing just the damaged part helps in saving costs for everyone and precious resources.
Aluminium
For our frames, we only use aluminium. It not only offers the best set of characteristics for our bikes’ purpose, but compared to carbon fibre, being the most commonly used alternative, aluminium uses less resources during production (1) and can be recycled at the end of its lifetime.
Production and Logistics
RAAW’s engineering, marketing and sales are all done from our HQ in Germany, and for production we work with Genio Bikes in Taiwan. Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration (2) set laws and regulations on a very high standard to improve air and water quality, control pollution, improve waste management and recycle resources.
Production in Taiwan means that we ship to our warehouse in Germany right in the center of Europe where most of our customers are located. We strive to use sea freight as much as possible, but also do use air freight on occasion. However, orders sent to you with DHL are compensated by DHL’s GoGreen (3) program, an option we have always used to offset the emissions produced from a chunk of our logistics (4).
Reducing Plastic Packaging
Over the past years we have reduced the amount of plastic packaging used, but we are still in the process of improving. All small parts come to us in bulk packaging, avoiding individual piece packaging, and for the most part, we use paper bags for the packaging of your orders.
Offsetting With Ecologi
Planting trees to offset our activities is something we started doing in early 2020. We offset the activities of our employees but also plant one tree for every order placed. This doesn’t represent the impact of the full order, but is a way to start. You can view a virtual representation of our forest here.
All of our actions come with a responsibility to our planet and the people involved. We produce and sell physical products that do use resources and require logistics. Our office is heated and we gather more miles with our cars than we would like. We have a lot to learn and improve, but we believe it’s good to start where we can, learn and adjust and offset the activities we can’t avoid.
*(1) https://view.publitas.com/trek-bicycle/trek-bicycle-2021-sustainability-report/page/5
*(2) https://www.epa.gov.tw/ENG/
*(3) https://www.dhl.de/en/privatkunden/kampagnenseiten/gogreen.html
*(4) https://www.dpdhl.com/en/sustainability/environment/green-product-portfolio/climate-protection-projects.html