Every so often a maker comes along who quietly suggests that the future of a material might be a plant.
Erba Cycles was founded by Randall Levrere, a framebuilder from Maine who fell early for the freedom of bikes and the satisfaction of building things with his own two hands. He is no newcomer to the workshop — Levrere had been brazing steel frames since the 1990s and racing them on the east coast long before he reached for something greener.
Why bamboo
His idea is disarmingly simple: combine bamboo and hemp, both sustainably grown, to grow rather than weld a bicycle into being — from race frames to easy city cruisers. Levrere argues that bamboo is the closest natural cousin to carbon fibre there is, which makes his frames naturally light and surprisingly stiff. Each one is handmade in the USA, by him, the joints lashed and bound where another builder would lay a weld.
The oldest material as the newest
There is something satisfyingly contrarian in this. The bicycle industry spends fortunes engineering exotic composites in factories; Levrere points to a grass that grows a metre a day and asks why we bothered. A bamboo frame absorbs road buzz the way carbon never quite does, and when its life is over it does not sit in a landfill for five hundred years.
Reading it again in 2026
More than a decade on, the case Erba was quietly making has only grown louder. “Sustainable” has become a marketing sticker slapped on carbon-heavy products, while the genuinely circular idea — a frame you could compost — still lives mostly in small workshops like this one. Levrere was never chasing a trend; he was chasing a feeling, the particular calm of a bicycle made from something that was recently alive. That instinct reads, today, less like nostalgia and more like foresight.
Grown, not welded. The phrase still sounds like a manifesto.