US outdoor org hosts free sustainability webinar for bike companies

The outdoor industry – in both the US and UK – is far ahead of the bike industry in its committment to sustainability. Bike companies wishing to learn more about going green should hook up with the US Outdoor Industry Association webinar on Thursday. It will be held at 10:00am MST and is free to join, and available globally.

Presented by OIA’s corporate responsibility team as well as guest speakers from Specialized and other bike industry companies, the one-hour session will provide an overview of the OIA Sustainability Working Group (SWG) — a volunteer collaboration among more than 250 outdoor industry brands, retailers and suppliers working to identify and improve the environmental and social impacts of their shared global supply chains.

A key takeaway for attendees will be how bike industry companies can get involved in these efforts and start measuring and improving the sustainability of their products.

“The outdoor industry’s collaborative sustainability efforts are groundbreaking, providing a common language and framework for measuring product-level sustainability,” said Beth Jensen, OIA’s director of corporate responsibility. “We’d like to see more bike industry companies get involved in this work.”

“Specialized joined the SWG last year to help develop the indexing tool for equipment,” said Bryant Bainbridge, who leads Specialized Bicycle Component’s corporate sustainability efforts. “The bike industry can leverage the outdoor industry’s work, which is more than five years in the making, to engage brands and suppliers and make sure all are using the same tools and standards for measuring product sustainability.”