MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of BEAMZ is to demonstrate that a business can make useful, beautiful, sustainable products that enrich people’s lives, while delivering at least three positive impacts:

• Reduced climate change

• Support and increase wildlife diversity

• Create high-wellbeing jobs and volunteering opportunities which aid and improve mental health.

BEAMZ Trust CIC (12925511) is a not-for-profit Social Enterprise.

Using Nature's Engineering To Build Wooden Bikes

Making a BEAMZ Bike Supports and Increases Wildlife Diversity

The frame of a BEAMZ bike is made from natural wooden poles that have been cut directly from a tree (in old English, a ‘beam’) and then hollowed out.

The poles are grown through a process known as coppicing, which has been used for over a 1000 years in the UK and Europe to make fencing, broom handles, arrows, charcoal and many other useful practical tools and products.

Coppicing introduces rotational harvesting into a wood, and when an area of poles (a coup) are cut down, the sunlight reaching the floor allows wildlife, fauna and flora to thrive, forming the base of the food chain.

Each year a coppice worker will harvest from an adjacent coup, eventually returning to the first after about 8 years; each year the wildlife and fauna ‘move’ with the cut to the next cleared space.

This method of forestry provides excellent support for biodiversity and its reduction in the last century, together with climate-change, is sadly responsible for the challenges faced by many of the UK’s indigenous species.

The UK government has recent signalled that coppicing was essential for land and environmental management which dovetails well with the ambitions of BEAMZ - if you have a coppice, you have a source of material for a BEAMZ workshop.

Even if you don’t have a coppice you can use clearance material from motorway and rail verges. Although not as convenient and manageable this is another excellent source of ‘waste’ material.

The Coppice And BEAMZ Workshop Combined

From an average coup you should expect enough material for at least 100 bikes, alongside the other products mentioned above.

By pioneering new, modern applications for Coppice wood poles, BEAMZ is creating a market for the material and providing the catalyst to bring existing woodland back into coppice management and also establish new coppice woodland.

If you have a coppice you can support a BEAMZ workshop, either in the local village, town, or transport the wooden poles to inner-city locations.

Our mission is to have workshops supplied by local coppices across the UK and beyond.

Think of them as an environmental alternative to chain stores but within them you have a wonderful combination of traditional skills combined with sustainable engineering.

A BEAMZ workshop will allow rural communities to support highly-skilled employment, volunteering, opportunities, and craft courses, making products that can be used locally while enhancing their economy.

And the BEAMZ Bike is just our first product...

How BEAMZ Reduces Climate Change

Producing conventional materials such as metals and plastics is one of our costliest processes in terms of energy-usage, CO2 production, environmental damage during mining, refining and disposal and social injustice.

Wood is a carbon-negative material with excellent structural properties.

Used by nature for millions of years and by humanity throughout our history, its growth absorbs carbon, creates oxygen and can support hundreds of species of invertebrate, which form the vital base of the food-chain.

For millennia wood for material and fuel has been grown in coppice managed woodland.

As mentioned above the BEAMZ bike stops 48kg of CO2 from reaching the atmosphere and a daily commute of 10 miles would stop 19kg of CO2 being produced by a vehicle making the same journey*.

The BEAMZ workshop also provides opportunities to utilise the by-products and waste from making the bicycles.

• Stripped bark can be stored and then turned into weaved bowls

• Shavings from the wood makes potpourri for the bowls

• Sawdust from the hollowing out process can be turned into pellets for fires

• Sawdust and chips can be heated to create biochar, a natural soil improver.

Working With Wood is Good For the Mind

As you have seen, BEAMZ as a business can reduce CO2, improve the environment, while making a product that is practical, long-living and beautiful to look at.

However, there is a third and equally important positive impact BEAMZ can deliver through its business model.

Working in woodland, working with wood and working to "make a difference" are all evidenced to be excellent for supporting wellbeing and repairing damaged mental health.

In a nutshell, this is a pleasant job and one that can also be utilised to help people bring a balance back into their life, or as a tool to help others.

Expanding BEAMZ

The BEAMZ pole has many uses but our first product, and test of our capabilities, is the bike.

BEAMZ has a large-scale ambition to make these bikes an affordable alternative to its unsustainable counterparts.

To achieve this, further development is required on the unique processes for processing the materials and building the bikes.

Although care has to be taken to ensure that the workshop doesn’t become a factory and lose all the benefits that working with traditional skills can bring.

For the future we see the BEAMZ pole becoming widely used for a diverse range of products.

It is also anticipated that each workshop will find and share new uses for the poles that are inspired by local needs or practical inventions.