Our £500 scooter.

After seeing Italians zipping around Rome on scooters when we visited last year, my girlfriend and I decided to go halves on some two-wheeled transport. It seemed like a fun, green and thrifty way to get around. But do mass produced cheap goods benefit the world, or is modern manufacturing an environmental liability symptomatic of an increasingly disposable society?

After searching for a ‘classic’ looking scooter it became apparent that a retro style Lambretta or Vespa would set us back more than a decent car. More investigation revealed that China produce cheap imitations of classic style Italian scooters. Of course the build quality is inferior, but they look pretty good. Oh and they are are cheap. Really, really cheap.

A classic Vespa in good condition costs at least £2000. A particularly lovely one could cost many times more. A brand new Baotian 50cc costs around £900. We found a 5 month old Baotian on eBay. It only had 300km on the clock and was in pretty much perfect condition. It was going for just £500.

We wondered, would it be ‘false economy’ to buy a cheap scooter? £500 was a great price but it may be cheaper in the long run to pay four times the amount for a proper Italian scooter that will stand the test of time. In the end though we couldn’t ignore the fact that at £500 the scooter was £120 cheaper than a one year bus pass for Leeds.

It costs £4 to fill the tank and does around 100 miles to the gallon. Also parking in city centre motorcycle bays is free! On the flat the bike tops out at 50mph. Going up steep hills is sometimes a little embarrassing though. But on a sunny day zipping past the cars stuck in traffic jams is huge fun.

For the first couple of months the bike ran great. Inevitably though the problems started coming. First it was a mechanical blockage. £90 to fix it. Then the throttle cable got kinked. This was particularly hairy as it happened in Leeds city centre and meant that the bike was ‘stuck’ on full throttle.  After a few seconds of thinking I was going to die I cut the engine. Even though I lived to see another day, the damage was £60. A couple of weeks later the electrics blew. Another £60. At this point we considered selling / scrapping it. But we persevered and since then it has run really well.

Aside from the low running costs and the fun of riding it, another reason we bought the scooter was that it is such a green way of getting around. 100 miles to the gallon is staggeringly economical. However, almost having to scrap the scooter when it was only a year old made me realise that cheap Chinese scooters are quite possibly an environmental liability. The cheap price of these scooters is getting a lot of people onto two wheels (which is great for carbon emissions), but producing them in huge numbers and accepting their short life span is not an environmentally sustainable model.

A beautiful example of a classic Lambretta.

Thanks to a very good local mechanic my (now 18 month old) scooter is currently running well. It is once more a fun and cheap way of getting around. If it lasts another couple of years it can probably be considered a success as an economical and green way of getting around. But if it dies anytime soon then it will have been a failure and our next scooter will have to be of a better quality. The fact that ‘classic’ Italian scooters are still on the road after 50 years speaks volumes. Besides look how stunningly beautiful Lambrettas are!

Even though this post relates to scooters it is a pretty similar story for a wide range of modern goods. DVD players, laptops, mobile phones and just about everything else made in China are mass produced and very cheap. This has meant that people on low incomes can enjoy things that a few years ago they could not afford, which is undoubtedly a good thing. But what is the cost to the environment?

The depressing sight of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

We bury most of our rubbish in landfills. This in itself is quite depressing. But even more so is the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean. Most current estimates state that it is larger than the U.S. state of Texas, with some estimates claiming that it is larger than the continental United States. The patch contains debris that has been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.

I desperately hope my Baotian doesn’t end up floating in the Pacific Ocean.