From sustainable AI to the seafront: Manish rides his bamboo bike London to Brighton
Manish Godkhindi has spent more than a decade working on sustainability — ESG, net zero and climate — after a long career in data and AI. So the contradiction nagged at him: cycling is one of the cleanest ways to travel, yet the high-performance bikes the industry sells lean ever harder on carbon fibre, a material that is energy-hungry to make and notoriously hard to deal with at end of life.
His answer was to build his own frame from a plant instead.
What he built
Manish built a bamboo frame at the Bamboo Bicycle Club, joining the tubes with natural flax fibre rather than carbon. His wife named the finished bike "Bambi".
He's clear that his carbon sums are a back-of-an-envelope exercise, not a formal lifecycle analysis — but they're his own, and they're honest. Using Trek's published 2023 sustainability data, he noted that the carbon-fibre frame of a Trek Madone carries an embodied footprint of around 56 kg CO2e. By contrast, drawing on bamboo's carbon-storage figures, he reckoned his small bamboo frame stores roughly 3.3 kg of CO2 — a frame that, on his maths, starts life carbon-negative.
The ride
Last summer he set himself a personal challenge: ride the 70 miles from London to Brighton. He trained for three months and planned it meticulously, wrestling with self-doubt the whole way. On a crisp London morning his family and friends cheered him off, and around seven hours later he reached the coast.
In his own words:
"I have never been so happy to see the sea! It was a tough ride, but ultimately felt truly rewarding."
He hasn't stopped since — a wet, muddy Oxford-to-London run followed in March, and he's now eyeing London to Amsterdam.
Why it matters
Manish's build is the case for bamboo made by someone who spends his working life measuring carbon. He didn't need our marketing to convince him; he ran the numbers himself and decided a home-built bamboo frame was the honest choice. That's the whole point of a Bamboo Bicycle Club kit — you build it, you understand it, and you ride something you believe in.
Links
- Read Manish's own account: illuminem Voices, "Towards a more sustainable bicycle journey"
- Build your own: Bamboo Bicycle Club frame kits and workshops