Isoco specialises in manufacturing high-quality plastic products for numerous industries. Seeing the need for change in the bicycle industry, the Germany-based company is making headlines with its 100% recyclable frames made out of carbon composite material. Is mass-production of European frames closer to becoming a reality? 

V-Frames, the bicycle frame arm of Isoco, produces carbon-composite injected molded frames with hollow volume geometries. This robotised, carbon injected molding technology allows a complete bicycle frame to be produced every 90 seconds. Aiming to cut supply chains from Asia, the company claims to have “the greenest way to produce carbon frames in the world.” Michael Mueller, CEO of Isoco explains more.

What specific problems did you come across when developing the ‘V-Frames’ technology? 

Michael Mueller: Our aim is, with a new material, develop a bike which is lighter than aluminium, which has better mechanical performance than aluminium and which is produced in mass production and 100% recyclable in Germany. So the whole development process of developing and designing such a bike is an ongoing process which we continue to learn about. The second important challenge is how to actually build such a complex mould for a reasonable price to allow mass production in repeatable quality with minimum amount of labour.

What percentage of recycled materials do you use in each frame? 

Right now we use carbon composite material. All of our material that we use currently has 100% recycled carbon fibres from the automotive industry combined with Polyamide. So already all our products we produce today use only recycled fibres. Also, at the end of the lifetime, we guarantee that we recycle our frames. That means we take back our frames and use them for new frame production or new bicycle frame component production. So basically complete circularity; we already use recycled fibres and we guarantee to take back products that we produce with our material.

Sometimes you add a certain percentage of new material to optimise the technical performance of the bike, depending on the specifications, etc. Do you expect to achieve a complete reduction of virgin material in future? 

Definitely. First of all, the material is extremely long living. For example, some of our customers give a guarantee of 30 years for the frames, so we’re not yet receiving any frames back yet. The moment we get a reasonable amount of frames back, we will, but we simply don’t have enough material back yet. We can produce frames out of 100% recycled material, re-recycled materials even. Of course, it depends on the frame geometry and the stiffness you want to have. We can also make any mix. For example a low step frame will have a different material mix than a diamond shape frame because you have other geometry to measure. Basically anything is possible. We work a lot on the materials so that each specific frame we provide to the customer will have a specific material combination which is optimal for the frame. This, of course, whilst trying to optimise the use of recycled materials, or re-recycled materials. But we have already done it, we can produce frames with 100% re-recycled materials.